Individualism and Carl Jung
The aim of individuation is nothing less than to divest the self of the false wrappings of the persona on the one hand and of the suggestive power of primordial images on the other . . . But when we turn to . . . the influence of the collective unconscious, we find we are moving in a dark interior world that is vastly more difficult to understand than the psychology of the persona, which is accessible to everyone . . . It is another thing to describe . . . those subtle inner processes which invade the conscious mind with such suggestive force. Perhaps we can best portray these influences with the help of examples of mental illness, creative inspiration, and religious conversion.
In a previous passage (1971:118) Jung points out that individuation is not identification with the collective unconscious, for this leads to a naive megalomania "in the form of prophetic inspiration and desire for martyrdom." Considering all this, it is not surprising that the path of the mystic has been called "the razor's edge."
Wherever in the world of man or nature one finds insulation, it is there for a reason. No less necessary is the insulation which separates the conscious mind from the generalized preconscious, for if it were not there, the ego would be overwhelmed and driven to madness by the superordinate and chaotic aspect of the numinous element. For the conscious mind is a finite tool, encased in space and time, and it can make sense of only a small amount of the universe at a given time. This situation again suggests that care should be taken in so important an undertaking and that efforts to contact the numinous element should proceed from pure motives, lofty ideals, and a firm resolution never to bring harm to others or to nature as a result of our actions.
The integrity of the ego is preserved by a rather narrowly defined channel in the volume of perceptual intake. It is this well-defined band that actually sustains the ego. Take it away and we lose consciousness (as in sleep or other altered states); increase it with perceptual overload or percepts which cannot be cognitively assimilated syntaxically and we have the trauma usually induced by a numinous experience. The so-called continuity of the ego is not independent but is the resultant of a carefully balanced perceptual intake. --J.C. Gowan
In a previous passage (1971:118) Jung points out that individuation is not identification with the collective unconscious, for this leads to a naive megalomania "in the form of prophetic inspiration and desire for martyrdom." Considering all this, it is not surprising that the path of the mystic has been called "the razor's edge."
Wherever in the world of man or nature one finds insulation, it is there for a reason. No less necessary is the insulation which separates the conscious mind from the generalized preconscious, for if it were not there, the ego would be overwhelmed and driven to madness by the superordinate and chaotic aspect of the numinous element. For the conscious mind is a finite tool, encased in space and time, and it can make sense of only a small amount of the universe at a given time. This situation again suggests that care should be taken in so important an undertaking and that efforts to contact the numinous element should proceed from pure motives, lofty ideals, and a firm resolution never to bring harm to others or to nature as a result of our actions.
The integrity of the ego is preserved by a rather narrowly defined channel in the volume of perceptual intake. It is this well-defined band that actually sustains the ego. Take it away and we lose consciousness (as in sleep or other altered states); increase it with perceptual overload or percepts which cannot be cognitively assimilated syntaxically and we have the trauma usually induced by a numinous experience. The so-called continuity of the ego is not independent but is the resultant of a carefully balanced perceptual intake. --J.C. Gowan
http://jcer.com/index.php/jcj/issue/view/79
Reginald Machell " The Path" 1895
"(...) Our lives do not progress in a straight line, but they are delayed, they swing, they go back, renew themselves, they repeat." - J. Hillman from: The Soul Code, p. 181
"Jung calls the individual who identifies himself with his persona a mana personality; we would call him a stuffed shirt. That’s a person who is nothing but the role he or she plays. A person of this sort never lets his actual character develop. He remains simply a mask, and as his powers fail—as he makes mistakes and so forth—he becomes more and more frightened of himself, puts more and more of an effort into keeping up the mask. Then the separation between the persona and the self takes place, forcing the shadow to retreat further and further into the abyss.
You are to assimilate the shadow, embrace it. You don’t have to act on it, necessarily, but you must know it and accept it. You are not to assimilate the anima/animus—that’s a different challenge. You are to relate to it through the other. The only way one can become a human being is through relationships to other human beings.” – Joseph Campbell, Pathways to Bliss
“To become—in Jung’s terms—individuated, to live as a released individual, one has to know how and when to put on and to put off the masks of one’s various life roles. ‘When in Rome, do as the Romans do,’ and when at home, do not keep on the mask of the role you play in the Senate chamber. But this, finally, is not easy, since some of the masks cut deep. They include judgment and moral values. They include one’s pride, ambition, and achievement. They include one’s infatuations. It is a common thing to be overly impressed by and attached to masks, either some mask of one’s own or the mana-masks of others. The work of individuation, however, demands that one should not be compulsively affected in this way. The aim of individuation requires that one should find and then learn to live out of one’s own center, in control of one’s for and against. And this cannot be achieved by enacting and responding to any general masquerade of fixed roles.” ~Joseph Campbell, Myths to Live By
"Jung has said that to be in a situation where there is no way out, or to be in a conflict where there is no solution, is the classical beginning of the process of individuation. It is meant to be a situation without solution: the unconscious wants the hopeless conflict in order to put ego-consciousness up against the wall, so that the man has to realise that whatever he does is wrong, whichever way he decides will be wrong.
This is meant to knock out the superiority of the ego, which always acts from the illusion that it has the responsibility of decision. Naturally, if a man says, "Oh well, then I shall just let everything go and make no decision, but just protract and wriggle out of [it]," the whole thing is equally wrong, for then naturally nothing happens.
But if he is ethical enough to suffer to the core of his personality, then generally because of the insolubility of the conscious situation, the Self manifests. In religious language you could say that the situation without issue is meant to force the man to rely on an act of God. In psychological language the situation without issue, which the anima arranges with great skill in a man's life, is meant to drive him into a condition in which he is capable of experiencing the Self.
When thinking of the anima as the soul guide, we are apt to think of Beatrice leading Dante up to Paradise, but we should not forget that he experienced that only after he had gone through Hell. Normally, the anima does not take a man by the hand and lead him right up to Paradise; she puts him first into a hot cauldron where he is nicely roasted for a while." ~von Franz
Jung felt that the task of individuation involved resisting collective forces and developing a critical response to them. Any collective movement which identifies with an archetypal process is, virtually by definition, not going to accord with Jungian taste, which is based on the ethics and aesthetics of individuation. Jung's attack on what he called "identification with the collective psyche" is conveniently and deliberately ignored by all those New Age therapists, consultants, advocates, and shamans who like to freely celebrate and even "worship" the contemporary version of constellated archetypal contents.
If the New Age appears Jungian it is not because it has used Jung, but because it draws its life from and incessantly parades a particularly strong archetypal current that maps this psycho-spiritual territory. The same subjective evaluations and claims have been made for esoterics such as astrology, depth psychology, and for the Standard Model in physics. People claim they use them because "they work." Archetypal correlations, a heightened level of communication between unconscious and conscious coordination, are radically participatory in nature, shaped by relevant circumstantial factors and human response. (Tacey)http://www.planetdeb.net/spirit/contrast.htm
The first step in individuation is tragic guilt. The accumulation of guilt demands expiation ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 1094.
"But in the case of a real settlement it is not a question of interpretation: it is a question of releasing unconscious processes and letting them come into the conscious mind in the form of fantasies. We can try our hand at interpreting these fantasies if we like.
In many cases it may be quite important for the patient to have some idea of the meaning of the fantasies produced. But it is of vital importance that he should experience them to the full and, in so far as intellectual understanding belongs to the totality of experience, also understand them. Yet I would not give priority to understanding.
Naturally the doctor must be able to assist the patient in his understanding, but, since he will not and indeed cannot understand everything, the doctor should assiduously guard against clever feats of interpretation. The transcendent function does not proceed without aim and purpose, but leads to the revelation of the essential man.
It is in the first place a purely natural process, which may in some cases pursue its course without the knowledge or assistance of the individual, and can sometimes forcibly accomplish itself in the face of opposition.
The meaning and purpose of the process is the realization, in all its aspects, of the personality originally hid- den away in the embryonic germplasm; the production and unfolding of the original, potential wholeness.
The symbols used by the unconscious to this end are the same as those which mankind has always used to express wholeness, completeness, and perfection: symbols, as a rule, of the quaternity and the circle.
For these reasons I have termed this the individuation process. This natural process of individuation served me both as a model and guiding principle for my method of treatment.
--Carl Jung, CW 7, Paras 186-187
Individuation means becoming an “individual,” and, in so far as “individuality” embraces our innermost, last, and incomparable uniqueness, it also implies becoming one’s own self.
We could therefore translate individuation as “coming to selfhood” or “self-realization.”
--Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 266
The aim of individuation is nothing less than to divest the self of the false wrappings of the persona on the one hand, and of the suggestive power of primordial images on the other.
--Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 269
"Human beings have one faculty which, though it is of the greatest utility for collective purposes, is most pernicious for individuation, and that is the faculty of imitation. Collective psychology cannot dispense with imitation, for without it all mass organizations, the State and the social order, are impossible. Society is organized, indeed, less by law than by the propensity to imitation, implying equally suggestibility, suggestion, and mental contagion.
But we see every day how people use, or rather abuse, the mechanism of imitation for the purpose of personal differentiation: they are content to ape some eminent personality, some striking characteristic or mode of behavior, thereby achieving an outward distinction from the circle in which they move.
We could almost say that as a punishment for this the uniformity of their minds with those of their neighbors, already real enough, is intensified into an unconscious, compulsive bondage to the environment.
As a rule these specious attempts at individual differentiation stiffen into a pose, and the imitator remains at the same level as he always was, only several degrees more sterile than before. To find out what is truly individual in ourselves, profound reflection is needed; and suddenly we realize how uncommonly difficult the discovery of individuality is.
--Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 242.
"In the individuation process, it anticipates the figure that comes from the synthesis of conscious and unconscious elements in the personality. It is therefore a symbol which unites the opposites; a mediator, bringer of healing, that is, one who makes whole. Because it has this meaning, the child motif is capable of the numerous transformations mentioned above: it can be expressed by roundness, the circle or sphere, or else by the quaternity as another form of wholeness. I have called this wholeness that transcends consciousness the “self.” The goal of the individuation process is the synthesis of the self." --Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 278
"The goal of individuation is not narcissistic self-absorption, as some might believe, but rather the manifestation of the larger purposes of nature through the incarnation of the individual. Each person, however insignificant in geopolitical terms, is the carrier of some small part of the telos of nature, the origin of which is shrouded in mystery but whose goal is conceivably dependent upon the enlargement of consciousness. If that be true, and I believe it is, then the task of individuation is wholeness, not goodness, not purity, not happiness. And wholeness includes the descent which the psyche frequently imposes upon the unwilling ego. "
– James Hollis, Swamplands of the Soul, Introduction.
For the alchemists the process of individuation represented by the opus was an analogy of the creation of the world, and the opus itself an analogy of God’s work of creation. --Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 550
This, roughly, is what I mean by the individuation process. As the name shows, it is a process or course of development arising out of the conflict between the two fundamental psychic facts. Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 522-523
Animals generally signify the instinctive forces of the unconscious, which are brought into unity within the mandala. This integration of the instincts is a prerequisite for individuation.
--Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 660
If the individuation process is made conscious, consciousness must confront the unconscious and a balance between the opposites must be found. As this is not possible through logic, one is dependent on symbols which make the irrational union of opposites possible. They are produced spontaneously by the unconscious and are amplified by the conscious mind.
The central symbols of this process describe the self, which is man’s totality, consisting on the one hand of that which is conscious to him, and on the other hand of the contents of the unconscious. --Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 755
Individuation appears, on the one hand, as the synthesis of a new unity which previously consisted of scattered particles, and on the other hand, as the revelation of something which existed before the ego and is in fact its father or creator and also its totality.
--Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 400
"Individuation is an expression of that biological process—simple or complicated as the case may be —by which every living thing becomes what it was destined to become from the beginning. This process naturally expresses itself in man as much psychically as somatically. Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 460 The goal of psychological, as of biological, development is self-realization, or individuation. But since man knows himself only as an ego, and the self, as a totality, is indescribable and indistinguishable from a God image, self-realization—to put it in religious or metaphysical terms —amounts to God’s incarnation. That is already expressed in the fact that Christ is the son of God." --Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 233
The metaphysical process is known to the psychology of the unconscious as the individuation process. In so far as this process, as a rule, runs its course unconsciously as it has from time immemorial, it means no more than the acorn becomes an oak, the calf a cow, and the child an adult. But if the individuation process is made conscious, consciousness must confront the unconscious and a balance between the opposites must be found. As this is not possible through logic, one is dependent on symbols which make the irrational union of opposites possible. They are produced spontaneously by the unconscious and are amplified by the conscious mind.
--Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 755
"The difference between the “natural” individuation process, which runs its course unconsciously, and the one which is consciously realized, is tremendous. In the first case consciousness nowhere intervenes; the end remains as dark as the beginning. In the second case so much darkness comes to light that the personality is permeated with light, and consciousness necessarily gains in scope and insight. The encounter between conscious and unconscious has to ensure that the light which shines in the darkness is not only comprehended by the darkness, but comprehends it." --Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 756
Your heights are your own mountain, which belongs to you and you alone. There you are individual and live your very own life. If you live your own life, you do not live the common life, which is always continuing and never-ending, the life of history and the inalienable and ever-present burdens and products of the human race. There you live the endlessness of being, but not the becoming. Becoming belongs to the heights and is full of torment.
~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 267.
At your low point you are no longer distinct from your fellow beings. You are not ashamed and do not regret it, since insofar as you live the life of your fellow beings and descend to their lowliness you also climb into the holy stream of common life, where you are no longer an individual on a high mountain, but a fish among fish, a frog among frogs.
~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 266.
Incidentally-mustn't it be a peculiarly beautiful feeling to hit bottom in reality at least once, where there is no going down any further, but only upward beckons at best? Where for once one stands before the whole height of reality? ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 265.
"The goal of psychological, as of biological, development is self-realization, or individuation. But since man knows himself only as an ego, and the self, as a totality, is indescribable and indistinguishable from a God-image, self-realization-to put it in religious or metaphysical terms-amounts to God’s incarnation.
"That is already expressed in the fact that Christ is the son of God. And because individuation is an heroic and often tragic task, the most difficult of all, it involves suffering, a passion of the ego: the ordinary, empirical man we once were is burdened with the fate of losing himself in a greater dimension and being robbed of his fancied freedom of will. He suffers, so to speak, from the violence done to him by the self.
"The analogous passion of Christ signifies God’s suffering on account of the injustice of the world and the darkness of man. The human and the divine suffering set up a relationship of complementarity with compensating effects. Through the Christ-symbol, man can get to know the real meaning of his suffering: he is on the way towards realizing his wholeness.
"As a result of the integration of conscious and unconscious, his ego enters the “divine” realm, where it participates in “God’s suffering.” The cause of the suffering is in both cases the same, namely “incarnation,” which on the human level appears as “individuation.”
"The divine hero born of man is already threatened with murder, he has nowhere to lay his head, and his death is a gruesome tragedy. The self is no mere concept or logical postulate; it is a psychic reality, only part of it is conscious, while for the rest it embraces the life of the unconscious and is therefore inconceivable except in the form of symbols.
The drama of the archetypal life of Christ describes in symbolic images the events in the conscious-life-as well as the life that transcends consciousness-of a man who has been transformed by his higher destiny." ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion,
A Psychological Approach to the Trinity, Paragraph 233.
"In the center is the individual where the opposites are united, the one peaceful spot in man, the space where nothing moves embedded in a world of chaos. The task is now to bring about order, the alchemistic process must begin, namely, the production of the valuable substance, the transformation into the light. You see this mandala does not represent a normal condition of the collective unconscious; this is a turmoil caused by the appearance of the disturbing element in the center. For we may assume that the collective unconscious is in absolute peace until the individual appears.
Therefore individuation is a sin; it is an assertion of one particle against the gods, and when that happens even the world of the gods is upset, then there is turmoil. But in that abstraction, or that union-the coming together of the pair of opposites-there is absolute peace. Otherwise there is only the peace of God in a world in which there is no individual, in other words, no consciousness. Yes, perhaps it exists to metaphysical consciousness, but not to any mortal consciousness because there is none. You see, this chaos is due to the appearance of that center, but that is a center of peace because the pairs of opposites are united.
As it is said in the prophesies of lsaiah, the leopard shall lie down with the kid and the wolf shall dwell with the lamb. Or that very impressive symbolism that the sucking child shall play on the hole of the asp, or put its hand into the cockatrice’s den." -- Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 263
It is also a plausible hypothesis that the archetype is produced by the original life urge and then gradually grows up into consciousness-with the qualification, however, that the innermost essence of the archetype can never become wholly conscious, since it is beyond the power of imagination and language to grasp and express its deepest nature. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 313.
Kundalini, Morris Graves
"to love is to create in beauty, both in the body and in the soul", says Plato. But when the soul, the psyche is separated from Eros, it is transformed into the inhibition of walls around her, in the reflection thought that as excess of thought is only mental. It is the reflection that does not need the other to feed, which is self-sufficient, self-sufficient, Autocreative, and which may also become, or claim to become, the ideal of 'know yourself'. [...] you know yourself. For Hillman, it can only value if it is meant to be true to its daimon ".
The Essential James Hillman: A Blue Fire
"to love is to create in beauty, both in the body and in the soul", says Plato. But when the soul, the psyche is separated from Eros, it is transformed into the inhibition of walls around her, in the reflection thought that as excess of thought is only mental. It is the reflection that does not need the other to feed, which is self-sufficient, self-sufficient, Autocreative, and which may also become, or claim to become, the ideal of 'know yourself'. [...] you know yourself. For Hillman, it can only value if it is meant to be true to its daimon ".
The Essential James Hillman: A Blue Fire
The process of Individuation is not “Mysticism,” “Shamanism,” “Alchemy,” or “Gnosticism”. It is an expression of the psychobiological process by which every living thing becomes
what it was destined to become from the beginning.
"The dead who besiege us are souls who have not fulfilled the principium individuation is, or else they would have become distant stars. Insofar as we do not fulfill it, the dead have a claim on us and besiege us and we cannot escape them." --Carl Jung; The Red Book; Appendix C; Page 370
what it was destined to become from the beginning.
"The dead who besiege us are souls who have not fulfilled the principium individuation is, or else they would have become distant stars. Insofar as we do not fulfill it, the dead have a claim on us and besiege us and we cannot escape them." --Carl Jung; The Red Book; Appendix C; Page 370
“In our description of nature the purpose is not to disclose the real essence of the phenomena but only to track down, as far as possible, relations between the manifold aspects of our experience.” --Niels Bohr
"It would be most satisfactory of all if psyche and physis could be seen
as complementary aspects of the same reality." --Wolfgang Pauli
“Spirituality is not to be learned by flight from the world, or by running away from things, or by turning solitary and going apart from the world. Rather, we must learn an inner solitude wherever or with whomsoever we may be. We must learn to penetrate things and find God there.” ― Meister Eckhart
Projection
You see, our whole mental life, our consciousness, began with projections. Our mind under primitive conditions was entirely projected, and it is interesting that those internal contents, which made the foundation of real consciousness, were projected the farthest into space into the stars. So the first science was astrology. That was an attempt of man to establish a line of communication between the remotest objects and himself. Then he slowly fetched back all those projections out of space into himself.
Primitive man-wei!, even up to modern times lives in a world of animated objects. Therefore that term of Tylor’s, animism, which is simply the state of projection where man experiences his psychical contents as parts of the objects of the world. Stones, trees, human beings, families are all alive along with my own psyche and therefore I have a participation mystique with them. I influence them and I am influenced by them in a magical way, which is only possible because there is that bond of sameness. What appears in the animal say, is identical with myself because it is myself-it is a projection.
So our psychology has really been a sort of coming together, a confluence of projections.
The old gods, for instance, were very clearly psychical functions, or events, or certain emotions; some are thoughts and some are definite emotions. A wrathful god is your own wrathfulness. A goddess like Venus or Aphrodite is very much your own sexuality, but projected. Now, inasmuch as these figures have been deflated, inasmuch as they do not exist any longer, you gradually become conscious of having those qualities or concepts; you speak of your sexuality. That was no concept in the early centuries, but was the god, Aphrodite or Cupid or Kama or whatever name it was called by.
Then slowly we sucked in those projections and that accumulation made up psychological consciousness. Now, inasmuch as our world is still animated to a certain extent, or inasmuch as we are still in participation mystique, our contents are still projected; we have not yet gathered them in.
The future of mankind will probably be that we shall have gathered in all our projections, though I don’t know whether that is possible. It is more probable that a fair amount of projections will still go on and that they will still be perfectly unconscious to ourselves. But we have not made them; they are a part of our condition, part of the original world in which we were born, and it is only our moral and intellectual progress that makes us
aware of them.
So the projection in a neurosis is merely one case among many; one would hardly call it abnormal even, but it is more visible-too obvious. Nowadays, one might assume that a person would be conscious of his sexuality and not think that all other people were abnormal perverts; because one is unconscious of it, one thinks that other people are therefore wrong. Of course that is an abnormal condition, and to any normal, balanced individual, it seems absurd.
It is an exaggeration, but we are always inclined to function like that to a certain extent; again and again it happens that something is impressive and obvious in another individual which has not been impressive at all in ourselves. The thought that we might be like that never comes anywhere near us, but we emphatically insist upon that other fellow having such-and-such a peculiarity. Whenever this happens we should always ask ourselves: Now have I that peculiarity perhaps because I make such a fuss about it? ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Pages 1496-1497
"It would be most satisfactory of all if psyche and physis could be seen
as complementary aspects of the same reality." --Wolfgang Pauli
“Spirituality is not to be learned by flight from the world, or by running away from things, or by turning solitary and going apart from the world. Rather, we must learn an inner solitude wherever or with whomsoever we may be. We must learn to penetrate things and find God there.” ― Meister Eckhart
Projection
You see, our whole mental life, our consciousness, began with projections. Our mind under primitive conditions was entirely projected, and it is interesting that those internal contents, which made the foundation of real consciousness, were projected the farthest into space into the stars. So the first science was astrology. That was an attempt of man to establish a line of communication between the remotest objects and himself. Then he slowly fetched back all those projections out of space into himself.
Primitive man-wei!, even up to modern times lives in a world of animated objects. Therefore that term of Tylor’s, animism, which is simply the state of projection where man experiences his psychical contents as parts of the objects of the world. Stones, trees, human beings, families are all alive along with my own psyche and therefore I have a participation mystique with them. I influence them and I am influenced by them in a magical way, which is only possible because there is that bond of sameness. What appears in the animal say, is identical with myself because it is myself-it is a projection.
So our psychology has really been a sort of coming together, a confluence of projections.
The old gods, for instance, were very clearly psychical functions, or events, or certain emotions; some are thoughts and some are definite emotions. A wrathful god is your own wrathfulness. A goddess like Venus or Aphrodite is very much your own sexuality, but projected. Now, inasmuch as these figures have been deflated, inasmuch as they do not exist any longer, you gradually become conscious of having those qualities or concepts; you speak of your sexuality. That was no concept in the early centuries, but was the god, Aphrodite or Cupid or Kama or whatever name it was called by.
Then slowly we sucked in those projections and that accumulation made up psychological consciousness. Now, inasmuch as our world is still animated to a certain extent, or inasmuch as we are still in participation mystique, our contents are still projected; we have not yet gathered them in.
The future of mankind will probably be that we shall have gathered in all our projections, though I don’t know whether that is possible. It is more probable that a fair amount of projections will still go on and that they will still be perfectly unconscious to ourselves. But we have not made them; they are a part of our condition, part of the original world in which we were born, and it is only our moral and intellectual progress that makes us
aware of them.
So the projection in a neurosis is merely one case among many; one would hardly call it abnormal even, but it is more visible-too obvious. Nowadays, one might assume that a person would be conscious of his sexuality and not think that all other people were abnormal perverts; because one is unconscious of it, one thinks that other people are therefore wrong. Of course that is an abnormal condition, and to any normal, balanced individual, it seems absurd.
It is an exaggeration, but we are always inclined to function like that to a certain extent; again and again it happens that something is impressive and obvious in another individual which has not been impressive at all in ourselves. The thought that we might be like that never comes anywhere near us, but we emphatically insist upon that other fellow having such-and-such a peculiarity. Whenever this happens we should always ask ourselves: Now have I that peculiarity perhaps because I make such a fuss about it? ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Pages 1496-1497
What is this invisible ground whose image we carry in our souls where spiritual ideals merge with worldly realities? Isn’t it always right here, right now everywhere always forever? We embody all the laws and principles of the universe.
The contextual background, the invisible environment, is the fundamental ground from which both mind and matter emerge, the luminous absolute space of reality beyond the mere absence of energy/matter. Is our worldview rooted in the ground or groundless speculation? Our cosmology is our map of the soul and the symbolic structure of meaning.
Earth, Humanity, Heavens
Inner and outer Cosmos presents the image of a myriad of perspectives, multiple centers and vortices within a connecting principle. Kaleidoscopic images are an endless cascade of repeating detail. Iteration represents the complicated behavior of simple functions, rational or irrational.
Human achievement is a group effort as no individual has the knowledge or competence to reproduce what society has accomplished. Full lives are lived somewhere between trauma and transcendence on the uncertain road of life. The transformative process continually folds in on itself, stretching and kneading psychic space, bringing in that which is needed, and disposing of irrelevant informational content. Forgetting is useful.
Neuroscientists suggest that forgetfulness is how the brain prioritizes crucial survival information. Some things go unconscious and that is OK, even necessary to survival. Keeping memories that are irrelevant to everyday existence isn’t necessary for our evolution and survival. They can be detrimental unless they help us make adaptive decisions.
Patterns produce complicated networks as a result of the propagation of signals through them. Networks can be thrown into chaotic behavior in response to the propagation of complex input. Human beings are systems with many functions, modes, and feedback/feedforward paths. Thus transformation can involve several, nonlinear phase changes and the emotional power of inner content.
Our perceptions of ourselves and cosmos come through the interplay of figure (ourselves), ground (cosmos) and patterning instinct -- souls hungry for meaning. But what do we really know about this canvas of our consciousness, this Ground Zero of our experience, this transcendental mystery? Wisdom has an emotional content.
If we look deep enough we find the cosmos and its sidereal myths within ourselves. Cosmogonies describe the primordial phase of differentiation between light and matter, mirroring mind and matter. Perhaps the very fabric of our consciousness is not only analogous but identical with the multiverse -- literal as well as figurative.
We live in a matrix of consciousness and life. The molecular basis of creativity and psychological transformation is the mind-brain-gene interaction. It creates novelty. Neuroplasticity synthesizes new mindbody proteins that are structural, functional, and informational. New neurons create new pathways to higher consciousness.
The unconscious permeates consciousness like the virtual vacuum permeates matter at all scales. The root relegere, ‘go through again’ suggests fractal reiterations of transforming experience with focused attention and critical thinking. Thus, our imperfect being realizes its preformed potentiality.
Dialogue with the genes takes place in sleep and dreams, when we are unconscious, the implicite or implicate level of innate processing. The hippocampus distributes new information throughout the cortex, consolidating memory, neurogenesis and gene expression.
Albert Popp has shown that DNA spontaneously emits biophotons during the opening and closing operations of DNA sections that allow genetic expression. Popp suggests that DNA information organizes a coherent network of interactive biophotonic correlates, including mitochondria, morphogenesis, growth and differentiation, and cell regeneration. DNA and biophotons direct the remote control set of the main activities of all vital processes as an antenna or transceiver of biophysical knowledge.
Can the amount of light released and absorbed by nuclear DNA communicate at distances to inform biophysical programming
associated with specific genetic information? Pribram's work suggested the biophotonic field of the brain is an interface with psyche.
There is strong evidence that shows we dream in all sleep states, as well as waking life to incorporate our experiences. The psyche or soul is this on-going dreamlife of the middle between conscious and unconscious worlds of phenomena that cannot be understood with reason alone. Parts of the psyche remain inaccessible through imaginal faculties while others, long buried, can be raised to awareness.
Environments can be notoriously invisible, below our perceptual threshold, and they have their own “ground rules”. Where is our “common ground” connecting spiritual and instinctual aspects, transpersonal and pre-conscious knowledge of the unconscious? Genealogy combined with experiential therapies is one such psychophysical Way of realizing the imaginal body; that body isn't purely somatic but includes the psychological and mystical.
Among other factors we have to consider what a Digital "environment" and technological paradigm of enhanced memory does to human psychology and social epistemology, and how it promotes institutional production of unconsciousness. Psychological independence from any liaison to institutions may be a necessary precondition for individuation, Jung's process of finding one’s own inner truth and fate.
Reconfiguring Social & Cultural Realities
Anthropology has adopted the notion of an 'Ontological Turn,' a form of relativism for truths that transcend us. It is an opening to other kinds of realities or 'worlds' and their 'potential inhabitants' beyond us. We are confronted with the Nature of Nature and the Nature of Culture.
Semiotics treats the dynamic and interactive basis of culture as a system of signs, symbols, and concepts. Any perspective on meaning arises from a web of interactions. Properly understanding meaning requires entry and immersion in this web -- fully entering a worldview or belief system "as if" it were real.
Also, for synchronicity to be more than chance or mere coincidence there must be a mirroring or equivalence of internal and external, subjective and objective aspects of the event. If psychophysical reality touches the heart, reveals clarity or numinosity, even better.
It shows the unity of existence, a Unus Mundus, an experience of timeless and temporal order. In a double wheel or mandala two paradoxical orders of existence are brought together in one figure. Psyche and matter merge in a sublime instant.
Different cultures have different relative notions, social and cultural constructs of how things are, should be, and could be and how we can connect with transformative potential. We 'know' them and consider them 'real' by the way their properties work their ways through us in ways that remake us. Our way of saying how this is opens our human way of being to that which lies beyond it.
How do we differentiate from the family and collective? Genealogy suggests one way ranges from psychophysical cellular excitement to mindful integration of both masculine and feminine archetypes.
Another is psychological polytheism as a manifestation of our varieties, the different people we are, the different longings and desires we have, unfolding where we are heading and what we want. Another is attending to images without interpreting them or turning them into symbols.
Completeness is in the image not in what it means... "every time you say what an image means, get a slap in the face... the dream becomes a koan... if you can literalize a meaning, "interpret" a dream, we are off track, we lost our koan (The dream is the thing, not what it means)." --James Hillman
The unconscious attitude may be the opposite of what we consciously profess. The unknown and inexpressible within us generates symbols and spiritual experience. When we become conscious of that creative expression, we give form to unconscious potentials.
There are other forms of psychic life besides acquiring psychic consciousness. Awareness of the symbolic interiority of the material body leads to direct observation of the subtle body, (Diamond Body, Merkaba, Glorious Body), reimagining our perception of ourselves. Primordial images are foundational principles, including the laws of nature.
The hero's journey may be our individuation process, but that doesn't mean we need to approach our breaking-down and coming together heroically with our over-achieving ego. The drama unfolds like a dream if we pay attention to its emergent qualities.
A capable ego doesn't need to push for the elusive end of the quest of self-discovery. We simply come to know ourselves more fully over our lifetimes, including the gaps in consciousness at the bottom of each breath.
How many times do we come to the paradox? Individuation is about holding the tension of the opposites, our psychological conflicts, conflicting images of ourselves, and unbalanced dichotomies. The greatest of these is the conscious and activated unconscious world whose union creates flexibility and a state change in consciousness in the core of our being.
Our reflective consciousness, psyche recognizes itself in the mirror of cosmos as matter recognizes itself in objective psyche. We can penetrate deeply into the psyche--into the vortex of the internal structuring process. Progressively de-structuring patterns of organization reveals the unfolding and enfolding structure of the unseen world.. This is gnosis -- the wisdom of unknowing absolute knowledge.
The primordial ground is invisible, immeasurable, unmanifest and, in fact, metaphysical, by definition. The void contains the most meaning. How can we attune to the nature of the ground, or ground our meditation?
Can we perceive reality as an unbroken wholeness more than conceptually? Mirrors are a symbol of the soul and often found in the crypts of spiritual leaders. Transcendent experience and the psychic process of imagination are not limited to religions. Jung considered individuation a conscious and unconscious attempt to create wholeness, or self-actualization, a metaphorical transformation of lead to gold.
Our lived realities are first and foremost mythical, not conceptual; they arise from the heart. The Grail, says Jung, is the principle of individuation available within each person. He noted, we each add an infinitesimal amount to the evolution of consciousness.
"For it is really true that if one creates a better relation to the unconscious, it proves to be a helpful power, it then has an activity of its own, it produces helpful dreams, and at times it really produces little miracles." ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 604
This Tao Shall Pass
The contextual background, the invisible environment, is the fundamental ground from which both mind and matter emerge, the luminous absolute space of reality beyond the mere absence of energy/matter. Is our worldview rooted in the ground or groundless speculation? Our cosmology is our map of the soul and the symbolic structure of meaning.
Earth, Humanity, Heavens
Inner and outer Cosmos presents the image of a myriad of perspectives, multiple centers and vortices within a connecting principle. Kaleidoscopic images are an endless cascade of repeating detail. Iteration represents the complicated behavior of simple functions, rational or irrational.
Human achievement is a group effort as no individual has the knowledge or competence to reproduce what society has accomplished. Full lives are lived somewhere between trauma and transcendence on the uncertain road of life. The transformative process continually folds in on itself, stretching and kneading psychic space, bringing in that which is needed, and disposing of irrelevant informational content. Forgetting is useful.
Neuroscientists suggest that forgetfulness is how the brain prioritizes crucial survival information. Some things go unconscious and that is OK, even necessary to survival. Keeping memories that are irrelevant to everyday existence isn’t necessary for our evolution and survival. They can be detrimental unless they help us make adaptive decisions.
Patterns produce complicated networks as a result of the propagation of signals through them. Networks can be thrown into chaotic behavior in response to the propagation of complex input. Human beings are systems with many functions, modes, and feedback/feedforward paths. Thus transformation can involve several, nonlinear phase changes and the emotional power of inner content.
Our perceptions of ourselves and cosmos come through the interplay of figure (ourselves), ground (cosmos) and patterning instinct -- souls hungry for meaning. But what do we really know about this canvas of our consciousness, this Ground Zero of our experience, this transcendental mystery? Wisdom has an emotional content.
If we look deep enough we find the cosmos and its sidereal myths within ourselves. Cosmogonies describe the primordial phase of differentiation between light and matter, mirroring mind and matter. Perhaps the very fabric of our consciousness is not only analogous but identical with the multiverse -- literal as well as figurative.
We live in a matrix of consciousness and life. The molecular basis of creativity and psychological transformation is the mind-brain-gene interaction. It creates novelty. Neuroplasticity synthesizes new mindbody proteins that are structural, functional, and informational. New neurons create new pathways to higher consciousness.
The unconscious permeates consciousness like the virtual vacuum permeates matter at all scales. The root relegere, ‘go through again’ suggests fractal reiterations of transforming experience with focused attention and critical thinking. Thus, our imperfect being realizes its preformed potentiality.
Dialogue with the genes takes place in sleep and dreams, when we are unconscious, the implicite or implicate level of innate processing. The hippocampus distributes new information throughout the cortex, consolidating memory, neurogenesis and gene expression.
Albert Popp has shown that DNA spontaneously emits biophotons during the opening and closing operations of DNA sections that allow genetic expression. Popp suggests that DNA information organizes a coherent network of interactive biophotonic correlates, including mitochondria, morphogenesis, growth and differentiation, and cell regeneration. DNA and biophotons direct the remote control set of the main activities of all vital processes as an antenna or transceiver of biophysical knowledge.
Can the amount of light released and absorbed by nuclear DNA communicate at distances to inform biophysical programming
associated with specific genetic information? Pribram's work suggested the biophotonic field of the brain is an interface with psyche.
There is strong evidence that shows we dream in all sleep states, as well as waking life to incorporate our experiences. The psyche or soul is this on-going dreamlife of the middle between conscious and unconscious worlds of phenomena that cannot be understood with reason alone. Parts of the psyche remain inaccessible through imaginal faculties while others, long buried, can be raised to awareness.
Environments can be notoriously invisible, below our perceptual threshold, and they have their own “ground rules”. Where is our “common ground” connecting spiritual and instinctual aspects, transpersonal and pre-conscious knowledge of the unconscious? Genealogy combined with experiential therapies is one such psychophysical Way of realizing the imaginal body; that body isn't purely somatic but includes the psychological and mystical.
Among other factors we have to consider what a Digital "environment" and technological paradigm of enhanced memory does to human psychology and social epistemology, and how it promotes institutional production of unconsciousness. Psychological independence from any liaison to institutions may be a necessary precondition for individuation, Jung's process of finding one’s own inner truth and fate.
Reconfiguring Social & Cultural Realities
Anthropology has adopted the notion of an 'Ontological Turn,' a form of relativism for truths that transcend us. It is an opening to other kinds of realities or 'worlds' and their 'potential inhabitants' beyond us. We are confronted with the Nature of Nature and the Nature of Culture.
Semiotics treats the dynamic and interactive basis of culture as a system of signs, symbols, and concepts. Any perspective on meaning arises from a web of interactions. Properly understanding meaning requires entry and immersion in this web -- fully entering a worldview or belief system "as if" it were real.
Also, for synchronicity to be more than chance or mere coincidence there must be a mirroring or equivalence of internal and external, subjective and objective aspects of the event. If psychophysical reality touches the heart, reveals clarity or numinosity, even better.
It shows the unity of existence, a Unus Mundus, an experience of timeless and temporal order. In a double wheel or mandala two paradoxical orders of existence are brought together in one figure. Psyche and matter merge in a sublime instant.
Different cultures have different relative notions, social and cultural constructs of how things are, should be, and could be and how we can connect with transformative potential. We 'know' them and consider them 'real' by the way their properties work their ways through us in ways that remake us. Our way of saying how this is opens our human way of being to that which lies beyond it.
How do we differentiate from the family and collective? Genealogy suggests one way ranges from psychophysical cellular excitement to mindful integration of both masculine and feminine archetypes.
Another is psychological polytheism as a manifestation of our varieties, the different people we are, the different longings and desires we have, unfolding where we are heading and what we want. Another is attending to images without interpreting them or turning them into symbols.
Completeness is in the image not in what it means... "every time you say what an image means, get a slap in the face... the dream becomes a koan... if you can literalize a meaning, "interpret" a dream, we are off track, we lost our koan (The dream is the thing, not what it means)." --James Hillman
The unconscious attitude may be the opposite of what we consciously profess. The unknown and inexpressible within us generates symbols and spiritual experience. When we become conscious of that creative expression, we give form to unconscious potentials.
There are other forms of psychic life besides acquiring psychic consciousness. Awareness of the symbolic interiority of the material body leads to direct observation of the subtle body, (Diamond Body, Merkaba, Glorious Body), reimagining our perception of ourselves. Primordial images are foundational principles, including the laws of nature.
The hero's journey may be our individuation process, but that doesn't mean we need to approach our breaking-down and coming together heroically with our over-achieving ego. The drama unfolds like a dream if we pay attention to its emergent qualities.
A capable ego doesn't need to push for the elusive end of the quest of self-discovery. We simply come to know ourselves more fully over our lifetimes, including the gaps in consciousness at the bottom of each breath.
How many times do we come to the paradox? Individuation is about holding the tension of the opposites, our psychological conflicts, conflicting images of ourselves, and unbalanced dichotomies. The greatest of these is the conscious and activated unconscious world whose union creates flexibility and a state change in consciousness in the core of our being.
Our reflective consciousness, psyche recognizes itself in the mirror of cosmos as matter recognizes itself in objective psyche. We can penetrate deeply into the psyche--into the vortex of the internal structuring process. Progressively de-structuring patterns of organization reveals the unfolding and enfolding structure of the unseen world.. This is gnosis -- the wisdom of unknowing absolute knowledge.
The primordial ground is invisible, immeasurable, unmanifest and, in fact, metaphysical, by definition. The void contains the most meaning. How can we attune to the nature of the ground, or ground our meditation?
Can we perceive reality as an unbroken wholeness more than conceptually? Mirrors are a symbol of the soul and often found in the crypts of spiritual leaders. Transcendent experience and the psychic process of imagination are not limited to religions. Jung considered individuation a conscious and unconscious attempt to create wholeness, or self-actualization, a metaphorical transformation of lead to gold.
Our lived realities are first and foremost mythical, not conceptual; they arise from the heart. The Grail, says Jung, is the principle of individuation available within each person. He noted, we each add an infinitesimal amount to the evolution of consciousness.
"For it is really true that if one creates a better relation to the unconscious, it proves to be a helpful power, it then has an activity of its own, it produces helpful dreams, and at times it really produces little miracles." ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 604
This Tao Shall Pass
"The way to truth was the journey of a lonely person to that which is eternally alone." -Plotinus
The Grail cycle, regardless of its origin, requires a commitment and soliude that draws on our internal resources. We train, dedicate and consecrate ourselves in self-initiation, mastering our weaknesses, purifying our nature, and fostering the highest parts of ourselves. We slowly climb the mountain from material being to soul-work. Our 'church' remains hidden because it is inside, our temple within our temples.
The search is always the same: a journey from illusion to light, a pilgrimage toward reality. E ery quest or Grail search must be an individual effort. There is no of joining something, proclaiming a membership, or depending upon a group support. There is no ongregation of the Church of the Holy Grail. Every part of it has to be individual, our soul searching forever for the eternal soul in life.
The Grail cycle, regardless of its origin, requires a commitment and soliude that draws on our internal resources. We train, dedicate and consecrate ourselves in self-initiation, mastering our weaknesses, purifying our nature, and fostering the highest parts of ourselves. We slowly climb the mountain from material being to soul-work. Our 'church' remains hidden because it is inside, our temple within our temples.
The search is always the same: a journey from illusion to light, a pilgrimage toward reality. E ery quest or Grail search must be an individual effort. There is no of joining something, proclaiming a membership, or depending upon a group support. There is no ongregation of the Church of the Holy Grail. Every part of it has to be individual, our soul searching forever for the eternal soul in life.
The Labyrinth
You have reached a passageway between the past and the future.
You are not lost, but what you are looking for has not yet been found.
"May Your Lead Turn to Gold"
"Even the enlightened person remains what he is, and is never more than his own limited ego before the One who dwells within him, whose form has no knowable boundaries, who encompasses him on all sides, fathomless as the abysms of the earth and vast as the sky."
~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 758
The psychic seems to me to be in actual fact partly extra-spatial and extra-temporal. “Subtle body" may be a fitting expression for this part of the psyche. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 522.
The Unfolding God of Jung and Milton, By James P. Driscoll, pg 27
individuation
A Deep Dive Into Memory & Imagination
Individuated Wholeness is Mature Freedom
Iona Miller, (c) 2017
Individuated Wholeness is Mature Freedom
Iona Miller, (c) 2017
"There is one thing in the world which you must never forget. If you were to forget everything else and remembered this, then you would have nothing at all to worry about; but if you were to remember everything else and then forget this, you would have done nothing with your life.
It is as if a king sent you to a country to carry out a particular mission. You go to that country, you do a hundred different things; but if you do not perform the mission assigned to you, it is as if you have done nothing. All human beings come into the world for a particular mission, and that mission is our singular purpose. If we do not enact it, we have done nothing…
Now, if you were to say, “Look, even if I have not performed this mission I have, after all, performed a hundred others,” that would mean nothing. You were not created for those other missions. It is as if you were to buy a sword of priceless Indian steel such as one usually finds only in the treasuries of emperors, and were to turn it into a butcher’s knife for cutting up rotten meat, saying, “Look, I’m not letting this sword stay unused, I am putting it to a thousand highly useful purposes.” Or it is as though you were to take a golden bowl and cook turnips in it, while for just one grain of that gold you could purchase hundreds of pots.
Or it is as though you were to take a dagger of the most finely-wrought and tempered steel and use it as a nail to hang a broken pitcher on, saying, “I am making excellent use of my dagger. I am hanging my broken pitcher on it, after all.” When you can hang a pitcher on a nail that costs only a few cents, what sense does it make to use a dagger worth a fortune?
Remember the root of your being, the presence of your lord. Give your life to the one who already owns your breath and your moments. If you don’t, you will be exactly like the man who takes his precious dagger and hammers it into his kitchen wall for a peg to hold his broken pitcher.
You are more valuable than both heaven and earth.
What else can I say? You don’t know your own worth.
Do not sell yourself at a ridiculous price,
You who are so valuable in God’s eyes."
--Jalāl Ad-Din Rumi
“We have to discover what really matters to us, what is the most important thing in our whole life, and then have the courage to live this deepest dream. Carl Jung said, ‘Find the meaning and make the meaning your goal.’ Whatever is most meaningful should be our purpose, whether this is to be a successful businessman or to climb a mountain. But if this one thing is to realize the Truth, then you are a mystic. And to follow the path of a mystic takes courage because you are doing something which does not belong to the mind or to the senses, but to the unknown and the unknowable.” --Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, Love Is a Fire
"We are not liberated by leaving something behind but only by fulfilling our task as mixta composita i.e., human beings between the opposites." ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 392-396
"The union of opposites in the stone is possible only when the adept has become One him/herself. The unity of the stone is the equivalent of individuation, by which [we are] made one; we would say that the stone is a projection of the unified self. This formulation is psychologically correct. It does not, however, take sufficient account of the fact that the stone is a transcendent unity. We must therefore emphasize that though the self can become a symbolic content of consciousness, it is, as a supraordinate totality, necessarily transcendent as well (CW 9/2, par. 264)." -Carl Jung, "The Alchemical Interpretation of the Fish," in Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self
"I am a psychologist and empiricist, and for me the meaning of life does not lie in annulling it for the sake of an alleged "possibility of transcendental existence" which nobody knows how to envisage.
We are men and not gods. The meaning of human development is to be found in the fulfilment of this life. It is rich enough in marvels. And not in detachment from this world.
How can I fulfil the meaning of my life if the goal I set myself is the "disappearance of individual consciousness"? What am I without this individual consciousness of mine? Even what I have called the "self" functions only by virtue of an ego which hears the voice of that greater being." --C.G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 381
"The term self is often mixed up with the idea of God. I would not do that."
~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Pages 977-978.
"So the self is not only an unconscious fact, but also a conscious fact: the ego is the visibility of the self." ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 977.
He [God] fills us with evil as well as with good, otherwise he would not need to be feared; and because he wants to become man, the uniting of his antinomy must take place in man. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 747.
He [Man] must know something of God’s nature and of metaphysical processes if he is to understand himself and thereby achieve gnosis of the Divine. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 747.
One should make clear to oneself what it means when God becomes man. It means more or less what Creation meant in the beginning, namely an objectivation of God. ~Jung, CW 11, Para 747.
It is as if a king sent you to a country to carry out a particular mission. You go to that country, you do a hundred different things; but if you do not perform the mission assigned to you, it is as if you have done nothing. All human beings come into the world for a particular mission, and that mission is our singular purpose. If we do not enact it, we have done nothing…
Now, if you were to say, “Look, even if I have not performed this mission I have, after all, performed a hundred others,” that would mean nothing. You were not created for those other missions. It is as if you were to buy a sword of priceless Indian steel such as one usually finds only in the treasuries of emperors, and were to turn it into a butcher’s knife for cutting up rotten meat, saying, “Look, I’m not letting this sword stay unused, I am putting it to a thousand highly useful purposes.” Or it is as though you were to take a golden bowl and cook turnips in it, while for just one grain of that gold you could purchase hundreds of pots.
Or it is as though you were to take a dagger of the most finely-wrought and tempered steel and use it as a nail to hang a broken pitcher on, saying, “I am making excellent use of my dagger. I am hanging my broken pitcher on it, after all.” When you can hang a pitcher on a nail that costs only a few cents, what sense does it make to use a dagger worth a fortune?
Remember the root of your being, the presence of your lord. Give your life to the one who already owns your breath and your moments. If you don’t, you will be exactly like the man who takes his precious dagger and hammers it into his kitchen wall for a peg to hold his broken pitcher.
You are more valuable than both heaven and earth.
What else can I say? You don’t know your own worth.
Do not sell yourself at a ridiculous price,
You who are so valuable in God’s eyes."
--Jalāl Ad-Din Rumi
“We have to discover what really matters to us, what is the most important thing in our whole life, and then have the courage to live this deepest dream. Carl Jung said, ‘Find the meaning and make the meaning your goal.’ Whatever is most meaningful should be our purpose, whether this is to be a successful businessman or to climb a mountain. But if this one thing is to realize the Truth, then you are a mystic. And to follow the path of a mystic takes courage because you are doing something which does not belong to the mind or to the senses, but to the unknown and the unknowable.” --Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, Love Is a Fire
"We are not liberated by leaving something behind but only by fulfilling our task as mixta composita i.e., human beings between the opposites." ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 392-396
"The union of opposites in the stone is possible only when the adept has become One him/herself. The unity of the stone is the equivalent of individuation, by which [we are] made one; we would say that the stone is a projection of the unified self. This formulation is psychologically correct. It does not, however, take sufficient account of the fact that the stone is a transcendent unity. We must therefore emphasize that though the self can become a symbolic content of consciousness, it is, as a supraordinate totality, necessarily transcendent as well (CW 9/2, par. 264)." -Carl Jung, "The Alchemical Interpretation of the Fish," in Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self
"I am a psychologist and empiricist, and for me the meaning of life does not lie in annulling it for the sake of an alleged "possibility of transcendental existence" which nobody knows how to envisage.
We are men and not gods. The meaning of human development is to be found in the fulfilment of this life. It is rich enough in marvels. And not in detachment from this world.
How can I fulfil the meaning of my life if the goal I set myself is the "disappearance of individual consciousness"? What am I without this individual consciousness of mine? Even what I have called the "self" functions only by virtue of an ego which hears the voice of that greater being." --C.G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 381
"The term self is often mixed up with the idea of God. I would not do that."
~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Pages 977-978.
"So the self is not only an unconscious fact, but also a conscious fact: the ego is the visibility of the self." ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 977.
He [God] fills us with evil as well as with good, otherwise he would not need to be feared; and because he wants to become man, the uniting of his antinomy must take place in man. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 747.
He [Man] must know something of God’s nature and of metaphysical processes if he is to understand himself and thereby achieve gnosis of the Divine. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 747.
One should make clear to oneself what it means when God becomes man. It means more or less what Creation meant in the beginning, namely an objectivation of God. ~Jung, CW 11, Para 747.
GOD IS REALITY ITSELF
At the time of the Creation he [God] revealed himself in Nature;
now he wants to be more specific and become man. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 631
SOUL IS THE ARCHETYPE OF LIFE ITSELF
Iona Miller, 2017
Archetypes are the source of soul images.
Soul life itself is the activity of those images.
We are in the psyche, Anima Mundi, cosmic soul,
which mates with the Cosmic Animus, living spirit.
The presence of psychic body reveals who we are.
Soul is a medium with internal energy.
Psyche is the totality of conscious and unconscious psychic processes.
"Individuation is a philosophical, spiritual and mystical experience."
--Jung, Psychology and Religion, Page 294.
"In the last analysis every life is the realization of a whole, that is, of a self, for which reason this realization can also be called "individuation." --Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 222.
‘Individuation’ is Jung’s term for the process of achieving such command of all four functions that, even while bound to the cross of this limiting earth, one might open one’s eyes at the center, to see, think, feel and intuit transcendence, and to act out of such knowledge. --Joseph Campbell, The Portable Jung
[We need] "to attempt to tap into a symbolic or archetypal expression of the entelechy principle operating in our lives. Entelechy is all about the possibilities encoded in each of us. For example it is the entelechy of an acorn to be an oak tree, of a baby to be a grown-up, of a popcorn kernel to be a fully popped entity, and of you and me to be God only knows what. It is possible to call upon the entelechy principle within us in such a way that it becomes personal, friendly, and even helpful. This entelechy principle can be expressed symbolically as a god or a guide. We feel its presence as the inspiration or motivation that helps us get life moving again after times of stress or stagnation. There are many ways to engage the symbolic forms of the entelechy principle..." --Jean Houston, THE HERO AND THE GODDESS:
THE ODYSSEY AS MYSTERY AND INITIATION, Ballantine Books, 1992, p. 62.]
At the time of the Creation he [God] revealed himself in Nature;
now he wants to be more specific and become man. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 631
SOUL IS THE ARCHETYPE OF LIFE ITSELF
Iona Miller, 2017
Archetypes are the source of soul images.
Soul life itself is the activity of those images.
We are in the psyche, Anima Mundi, cosmic soul,
which mates with the Cosmic Animus, living spirit.
The presence of psychic body reveals who we are.
Soul is a medium with internal energy.
Psyche is the totality of conscious and unconscious psychic processes.
"Individuation is a philosophical, spiritual and mystical experience."
--Jung, Psychology and Religion, Page 294.
"In the last analysis every life is the realization of a whole, that is, of a self, for which reason this realization can also be called "individuation." --Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 222.
‘Individuation’ is Jung’s term for the process of achieving such command of all four functions that, even while bound to the cross of this limiting earth, one might open one’s eyes at the center, to see, think, feel and intuit transcendence, and to act out of such knowledge. --Joseph Campbell, The Portable Jung
[We need] "to attempt to tap into a symbolic or archetypal expression of the entelechy principle operating in our lives. Entelechy is all about the possibilities encoded in each of us. For example it is the entelechy of an acorn to be an oak tree, of a baby to be a grown-up, of a popcorn kernel to be a fully popped entity, and of you and me to be God only knows what. It is possible to call upon the entelechy principle within us in such a way that it becomes personal, friendly, and even helpful. This entelechy principle can be expressed symbolically as a god or a guide. We feel its presence as the inspiration or motivation that helps us get life moving again after times of stress or stagnation. There are many ways to engage the symbolic forms of the entelechy principle..." --Jean Houston, THE HERO AND THE GODDESS:
THE ODYSSEY AS MYSTERY AND INITIATION, Ballantine Books, 1992, p. 62.]
INDIVIDUATION
The Inward Turn: Spiritual Independence
Whole Person Explorations & Transformation
Iona Miller, 2017
"We should not want to try to escape upward or downward from the world."
~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 25.
"For Jung, the call to individuate arises from the deepest sources of life and is supported inwardly and outwardly by the compensatory activities of nature. It is a call, therefore, that is not to be taken lightly. Both inwardly and outwardly nature strives unceasingly to bring about the realization, in the life of the individual, of a unique pattern of meaning."
--Robert Aziz, Jung’s Psychology of Religion and Synchronicity
"One recognizes the primordial nature of awareness, empty of any intrinsic identity, the place of rest that is pure from the beginning and beyond thought and expression. One recognizes the self-display of primordial wisdom, clear, radiant, and unimpedable, awakened from the beginning, unmediated, this self-arisen primordial wisdom abides in itself." --Dudjom Rinpoche
"You can only apprehend the Infinite by a faculty superior to reason, by entering into a state in which you are your finite self no longer—in which the divine essence is communicated to you. This is ecstasy [Cosmic Consciousness]. It is the liberation of your mind from its finite consciousness. Like only can apprehend like; when you thus cease to be finite, you become one with the Infinite. In the reduction of your soul to its simplest self, its divine essence, you realize this union—this identity. But this sublime condition is not of permanent duration. It is only now and then that we can enjoy this elevation (mercifully made possible for us) above the limits of the body and the world." --Plotinus
Stated in the broadest possible terms, individuation refers to the innate urge of life to realize itself consciously. The transpersonal life energy, in the process of creative self-unfolding, uses human consciousness, the essence of itself, as an instrument for its own self-realization. The Way is inseparable from the person, an internal presence.
First Light
We individuate from and recursively back toward our Origin, which we can call greater Presence. The essence of spiritual, psychological, and biological development is transcendence, self-realization or individuation of our labyrinthine human consciousness. It is symbolically expressed as our innate wisdom light. Radiance is the underlying unitive principle of empty awareness.
The source of life emerges through separation of immanent principles from transcendent source. The process of individuation is a refinement from the many to the one, from undifferentiated unconsciousness to individual consciousness -- from pre-personal to transpersonal. Individuation is the quest for wholeness, the journey to become more and more conscious of our unique self, the burning core of aliveness.
In Cosmic Consciousness (1901), R.M. Bucke described three forms of consciousness:
1.) Simple Consciousness, our instinctual consciousness.
2.) Self Consciousness, that self-awareness that allows realization as a distinct entity.
3.) Cosmic Consciousness, a new developing faculty at the pinnacle of our evolution.
To the extent we unconsciously disregard it, this is a nugatory world: trifling; worthless; of no force, invalid; useless, futile, inoperative, unimportant, inconsequential, valueless, trivial,
insignificant, meaningless, vain, unavailing, null, invalid. So part of our task is identifying and engaging the non-trivial. It is not only significant but extremely complex, difficult, and often can only be identified only by its effects.
Transformative symbols are a religious impulse -- unconscious carriers of both the conscious and unconscious worlds -- the noumenal and phenomenal body of image. The effect of this transmutation is the process of individuation, which Jung described as, "a conscious realization of everything the existence of an individual implies: his needs, his tasks, his duties, his responsibilities, etc." (Letters Vol. 1, Pg 503-505)
Recent scientific discoveries show that 'hidden dimensions' of the mind are more than metaphorical when relating form and function -- the link between neural network structure and emergent functioning. The architecture of the brain operates on 11 different dimensions, abstract mathematical spaces. Immense networks form our thoughts and actions. Markram's team described very intricate multi-dimensional geometrical shapes and spaces that look like "sandcastles." http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fncom.2017.00048/full
Only time will tell if the algebraic equations and topological modeling hold up in a meaningful way. We cannot even currently imagine the implications of this substrate, yet it suggests far more complexity than we imagined. What looked like chaotic patterns of neurons cliqued together to form specific geometric objects, multidimensional universes in a spec of brain tissue.
What memories and future thoughts might be in this higher dimensional spaces? Additional neurons added more dimensions filling then emptying high-dimensional cavities. Such architectural structures appear creating functional networks with constantly changing spaces and structures when the brain processes information. Then they disintegrate into nothing. No one had ever imagined this deeply hidden world, the interface of material and immaterial realms. http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fncom.2017.00048/full
David Bohm suggested the ground of all existence, the immense background of energy, is a plenum. He called it the "holomovement" that unfolds the enfolded information of the Implicate Order, the universe within. This ultimate ground extends into a multidimensional reality as the interplay between the implicate and explicate orders, within and without our universe. It is the flow of matter, manifested and interdependent, towards consciousness.
"In principle this reality is one unbroken whole, including the entire universe with all its fields and particles. Thus we have to say that the holomovement enfolds and unfolds in a multidimensional order, the dimensionality of which is effectively infinite. Thus the principle of relative autonomy of sub-totalities...is now seen to extend to a multidimensional order of reality." (David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order, Ark, 1983, pp. 156-167.)
Augmented Reality
Meaning is a non-material imaginal dimension. Individuation expresses psychically and somatically. Patterns of meaning shape each of us and our cultures. Imagination is a vital spiritual function, inseparable from the World Soul. World issues are soul issues. Psyche is soul. Symbols are the currency of consciousness.
"The symbols of the self arise in the depths of the body, and they express its materiality every bit as much as the perceiving consciousness. The symbol is thus a living body." (Jung, "The Psychology of the Child Archetype" in CW 9/1, par 291).
This connective tissue of the mind-body correlation is the complex body of internalized and externalized images. They are visible in the psychic aspect of symptoms and behavior, involving us in a collaborative process mapping the conceptual terrain. To heal trauma, the body must be involved and insights brought back into the body, like the coded universal reality of DNA.
Our invisible ground is now simultaneous information, a field that travels at the speed of light, centered everywhere and nowhere. In Einstein's theory, light can create gravity. If gravity can affect time, and light can create gravity, then light can affect time. Circulating light beams can twist empty time and space. Yet, the total energy of the universe is zero, implying the origin was zero. Our universe came from nothing, but it nevertheless has incredible structure and complexity.
Universally Present Origin
"Every soil has its secret, of which we carry an unconscious image in our souls: a relationship of spirit to body and of body to earth." (Jung; CW XVIII)
On the archaic level, the numinous experience of the individuation process is the prerogative of shamans and medicine men (oral culture). Later this searing intensity and transformative power is embodied in oracle, seer, prophet, then the artist, healer, intuitive, therapist, physician, and priest, as medicine, metaphysics, philosophy and religion.
In From Cliche to Archetype, McLuhan suggests that, "When all the cultures of the world are simultaneously present, the work of the artist in the elucidation of form takes on new scope and new urgency. Most men are pushed into the artist's role. The artist cannot dispense with the principle of 'doubleness' or 'interplay' because this type of hendiadys dialogue is essential to the very structure of consciousness, awareness, and autonomy."
James Hillman would add poetically, "the unconscious is where it has always been, at the edge of consciousness, intertwined with consciousness, where we do not look or do not want to see. The unconscious surrounds us. We're in the psyche. As the alchimisti insisted, the gold of potential lies in the bad waste of what we have at hand. Working this matter before the royal unconscious has always been the task of the artist who did not only express his personal suffering, but reflected the torment of the soul mundi, the suffering in the roots. ... The Artifex works with the soul in the soul mundi."
McLuhan proposed archetype as the ground where individual action is the figure, not universal or primordial figures or ideas with gnostic meanings. For McLuhan, gnosis is knowledge of the hidden ground. He argues that our very perceptions are clichés, since they are unconsciously suppressed and patterned by the many hidden, surrounding structures of culture.
We tend to see or hear what we expect to see or hear; unprecedented levels of fantasy. He thought language, humanity's "master technology," evoked a magical form of reality for archaic man. Technology materialized the collective unconscious and retrieved subliminal thoughts and Memory through media use, electric and digital culture.
Psyche constructs reality. Our experience of so-called reality is always mediated by our image of it. Even if all the contents of the psyche are real, that doesn't mean they are realistic. That psyche is real is still a radical proposition, but psychic politics certainly color the self-image and ideas of everyone.
We respond unconsciously to cyclic changes in our environment. We respond to our beliefs which operate in us unconsciously. Believers in spiritual traditions tend to uncritically accept their "inner experiences" as objectively true, rather than expressions or results of their beliefs.
We observe and participate with images. This is not an experience of a static "self" moving through process, but rather existential experience of self as process. We should not mistake psychological truth for metaphysical insight. All the inner visions and other fantastic apparitions are projections of our own minds.
Revisioning Self
Harry Stack Sullivan suggested our over-emphasized individuality is "the mother of all illusions," delusions of unique individuality. Coomaraswamy called such a belief animism. He suggested, if we are more processes than entities, "the first step on the way to liberation ... is to have realized ... that 'this (body and mind) is not my Self', that there is no such thing as a 'personality' anywhere to be found in the world".
https://www.thefreelibrary.com/Eliot+and+the+Manichean+myth+as+poetry.-a0280004567
Arguing against the idea of life maps and rigid developmental programs, Hillman broke with Jung over his prescriptive idea of the Self as the center and destination of individuation. His 'acorn theory', driven by the internal daemon or fate is considered more romantic and poetic but may be the deeper truth, as neurology suggests.
In Bohm's terms, the self is relatively autonomous; it unfolds in the implicate, displays in the explicate, and dissolved back into the implicate. The dissolution into formlessness happens at the "edge of chaos." In this condition we speculate that free-flowing matter and energy are capable of self-organization.
The implied "self" in this case is pure consciousness in dynamic evolution through multiple forms in multiple universes. The centrality of the self is purely a metaphor for its importance -- the self-organizing totality of psychic functioning, dynamic psychic structure. The self that does not exist is 'no-self'. This is the great Mystery at the core. Different people conceive it in different ways, including mandalas. Self is discovered in its own creative process.
Without neurological 'free will' Jung's notion falters. But self or no-self theories predate Buddhism and other Asian philosophies, and have always existed side by side. Sure, we can grow or wallow in given events, but Hillman suggests we give up antiquated notions of an over-achieving heroic ego, which we might call "the father of all illusions." Rather than inevitable, he sees events as somehow dependent on our innate future-shaping character -- the psychic connection between past and future.
Archaeology of the Mind
What is beyond the virtual realities of the dialogical self and a multistate paradigm of human nature? Arguably, it begs the question, is 'self' or 'Self' an archetype, or not, or another layer of delusory content, including its symbols, ageless wisdom figures, and formless varieties: Sage, Christ, King, Queen, Puer/Senex, Crone, Wise Sage, Holy Child. Traditionally, in their highest form, they are images of the man or woman who has realized the Self as goal of the spiritual journey.
Non-dual systems still differentiate between individual ego-self and innate universal self.
How do we distinguish the 'I' of personal identity? The basis of the human psyche seems to be a collective of selves--a multimind in a multiverse. Independent and autonomous, they relate with one another mostly unknown to the outer awareness. It invites re-imagining the self as any number of faces...and perhaps in this regard our genealogy is the most tangible example.
The Elder understands this journey toward Self-realization, even if still far from such personal realization. The task becomes one of "catching ourselves in the act" of creating our own "reality" from the flow of events. Human truth is always an engagement of mind with experience.
The sociological message is that we don't have to fear the collapse of what we think we are.
We don't need to fear the collapse of our personalistic belief system, nor our belief in absolute truth. Such ideas may be illusory, but not useless. We can know the universal wisdom path and also understand the fictions behind our ideas about all that.
It is analogous to asking in astrophysics if the sun powers itself or actually collects energy from the galaxy, as some models suggest. The art of emptying psychic contents is not so much a psychological or developmental process as much as an experiential grasp of allowing life to move through us.
The Inward Turn: Spiritual Independence
Whole Person Explorations & Transformation
Iona Miller, 2017
"We should not want to try to escape upward or downward from the world."
~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 25.
"For Jung, the call to individuate arises from the deepest sources of life and is supported inwardly and outwardly by the compensatory activities of nature. It is a call, therefore, that is not to be taken lightly. Both inwardly and outwardly nature strives unceasingly to bring about the realization, in the life of the individual, of a unique pattern of meaning."
--Robert Aziz, Jung’s Psychology of Religion and Synchronicity
"One recognizes the primordial nature of awareness, empty of any intrinsic identity, the place of rest that is pure from the beginning and beyond thought and expression. One recognizes the self-display of primordial wisdom, clear, radiant, and unimpedable, awakened from the beginning, unmediated, this self-arisen primordial wisdom abides in itself." --Dudjom Rinpoche
"You can only apprehend the Infinite by a faculty superior to reason, by entering into a state in which you are your finite self no longer—in which the divine essence is communicated to you. This is ecstasy [Cosmic Consciousness]. It is the liberation of your mind from its finite consciousness. Like only can apprehend like; when you thus cease to be finite, you become one with the Infinite. In the reduction of your soul to its simplest self, its divine essence, you realize this union—this identity. But this sublime condition is not of permanent duration. It is only now and then that we can enjoy this elevation (mercifully made possible for us) above the limits of the body and the world." --Plotinus
Stated in the broadest possible terms, individuation refers to the innate urge of life to realize itself consciously. The transpersonal life energy, in the process of creative self-unfolding, uses human consciousness, the essence of itself, as an instrument for its own self-realization. The Way is inseparable from the person, an internal presence.
First Light
We individuate from and recursively back toward our Origin, which we can call greater Presence. The essence of spiritual, psychological, and biological development is transcendence, self-realization or individuation of our labyrinthine human consciousness. It is symbolically expressed as our innate wisdom light. Radiance is the underlying unitive principle of empty awareness.
The source of life emerges through separation of immanent principles from transcendent source. The process of individuation is a refinement from the many to the one, from undifferentiated unconsciousness to individual consciousness -- from pre-personal to transpersonal. Individuation is the quest for wholeness, the journey to become more and more conscious of our unique self, the burning core of aliveness.
In Cosmic Consciousness (1901), R.M. Bucke described three forms of consciousness:
1.) Simple Consciousness, our instinctual consciousness.
2.) Self Consciousness, that self-awareness that allows realization as a distinct entity.
3.) Cosmic Consciousness, a new developing faculty at the pinnacle of our evolution.
To the extent we unconsciously disregard it, this is a nugatory world: trifling; worthless; of no force, invalid; useless, futile, inoperative, unimportant, inconsequential, valueless, trivial,
insignificant, meaningless, vain, unavailing, null, invalid. So part of our task is identifying and engaging the non-trivial. It is not only significant but extremely complex, difficult, and often can only be identified only by its effects.
Transformative symbols are a religious impulse -- unconscious carriers of both the conscious and unconscious worlds -- the noumenal and phenomenal body of image. The effect of this transmutation is the process of individuation, which Jung described as, "a conscious realization of everything the existence of an individual implies: his needs, his tasks, his duties, his responsibilities, etc." (Letters Vol. 1, Pg 503-505)
Recent scientific discoveries show that 'hidden dimensions' of the mind are more than metaphorical when relating form and function -- the link between neural network structure and emergent functioning. The architecture of the brain operates on 11 different dimensions, abstract mathematical spaces. Immense networks form our thoughts and actions. Markram's team described very intricate multi-dimensional geometrical shapes and spaces that look like "sandcastles." http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fncom.2017.00048/full
Only time will tell if the algebraic equations and topological modeling hold up in a meaningful way. We cannot even currently imagine the implications of this substrate, yet it suggests far more complexity than we imagined. What looked like chaotic patterns of neurons cliqued together to form specific geometric objects, multidimensional universes in a spec of brain tissue.
What memories and future thoughts might be in this higher dimensional spaces? Additional neurons added more dimensions filling then emptying high-dimensional cavities. Such architectural structures appear creating functional networks with constantly changing spaces and structures when the brain processes information. Then they disintegrate into nothing. No one had ever imagined this deeply hidden world, the interface of material and immaterial realms. http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fncom.2017.00048/full
David Bohm suggested the ground of all existence, the immense background of energy, is a plenum. He called it the "holomovement" that unfolds the enfolded information of the Implicate Order, the universe within. This ultimate ground extends into a multidimensional reality as the interplay between the implicate and explicate orders, within and without our universe. It is the flow of matter, manifested and interdependent, towards consciousness.
"In principle this reality is one unbroken whole, including the entire universe with all its fields and particles. Thus we have to say that the holomovement enfolds and unfolds in a multidimensional order, the dimensionality of which is effectively infinite. Thus the principle of relative autonomy of sub-totalities...is now seen to extend to a multidimensional order of reality." (David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order, Ark, 1983, pp. 156-167.)
Augmented Reality
Meaning is a non-material imaginal dimension. Individuation expresses psychically and somatically. Patterns of meaning shape each of us and our cultures. Imagination is a vital spiritual function, inseparable from the World Soul. World issues are soul issues. Psyche is soul. Symbols are the currency of consciousness.
"The symbols of the self arise in the depths of the body, and they express its materiality every bit as much as the perceiving consciousness. The symbol is thus a living body." (Jung, "The Psychology of the Child Archetype" in CW 9/1, par 291).
This connective tissue of the mind-body correlation is the complex body of internalized and externalized images. They are visible in the psychic aspect of symptoms and behavior, involving us in a collaborative process mapping the conceptual terrain. To heal trauma, the body must be involved and insights brought back into the body, like the coded universal reality of DNA.
Our invisible ground is now simultaneous information, a field that travels at the speed of light, centered everywhere and nowhere. In Einstein's theory, light can create gravity. If gravity can affect time, and light can create gravity, then light can affect time. Circulating light beams can twist empty time and space. Yet, the total energy of the universe is zero, implying the origin was zero. Our universe came from nothing, but it nevertheless has incredible structure and complexity.
Universally Present Origin
"Every soil has its secret, of which we carry an unconscious image in our souls: a relationship of spirit to body and of body to earth." (Jung; CW XVIII)
On the archaic level, the numinous experience of the individuation process is the prerogative of shamans and medicine men (oral culture). Later this searing intensity and transformative power is embodied in oracle, seer, prophet, then the artist, healer, intuitive, therapist, physician, and priest, as medicine, metaphysics, philosophy and religion.
In From Cliche to Archetype, McLuhan suggests that, "When all the cultures of the world are simultaneously present, the work of the artist in the elucidation of form takes on new scope and new urgency. Most men are pushed into the artist's role. The artist cannot dispense with the principle of 'doubleness' or 'interplay' because this type of hendiadys dialogue is essential to the very structure of consciousness, awareness, and autonomy."
James Hillman would add poetically, "the unconscious is where it has always been, at the edge of consciousness, intertwined with consciousness, where we do not look or do not want to see. The unconscious surrounds us. We're in the psyche. As the alchimisti insisted, the gold of potential lies in the bad waste of what we have at hand. Working this matter before the royal unconscious has always been the task of the artist who did not only express his personal suffering, but reflected the torment of the soul mundi, the suffering in the roots. ... The Artifex works with the soul in the soul mundi."
McLuhan proposed archetype as the ground where individual action is the figure, not universal or primordial figures or ideas with gnostic meanings. For McLuhan, gnosis is knowledge of the hidden ground. He argues that our very perceptions are clichés, since they are unconsciously suppressed and patterned by the many hidden, surrounding structures of culture.
We tend to see or hear what we expect to see or hear; unprecedented levels of fantasy. He thought language, humanity's "master technology," evoked a magical form of reality for archaic man. Technology materialized the collective unconscious and retrieved subliminal thoughts and Memory through media use, electric and digital culture.
Psyche constructs reality. Our experience of so-called reality is always mediated by our image of it. Even if all the contents of the psyche are real, that doesn't mean they are realistic. That psyche is real is still a radical proposition, but psychic politics certainly color the self-image and ideas of everyone.
We respond unconsciously to cyclic changes in our environment. We respond to our beliefs which operate in us unconsciously. Believers in spiritual traditions tend to uncritically accept their "inner experiences" as objectively true, rather than expressions or results of their beliefs.
We observe and participate with images. This is not an experience of a static "self" moving through process, but rather existential experience of self as process. We should not mistake psychological truth for metaphysical insight. All the inner visions and other fantastic apparitions are projections of our own minds.
Revisioning Self
Harry Stack Sullivan suggested our over-emphasized individuality is "the mother of all illusions," delusions of unique individuality. Coomaraswamy called such a belief animism. He suggested, if we are more processes than entities, "the first step on the way to liberation ... is to have realized ... that 'this (body and mind) is not my Self', that there is no such thing as a 'personality' anywhere to be found in the world".
https://www.thefreelibrary.com/Eliot+and+the+Manichean+myth+as+poetry.-a0280004567
Arguing against the idea of life maps and rigid developmental programs, Hillman broke with Jung over his prescriptive idea of the Self as the center and destination of individuation. His 'acorn theory', driven by the internal daemon or fate is considered more romantic and poetic but may be the deeper truth, as neurology suggests.
In Bohm's terms, the self is relatively autonomous; it unfolds in the implicate, displays in the explicate, and dissolved back into the implicate. The dissolution into formlessness happens at the "edge of chaos." In this condition we speculate that free-flowing matter and energy are capable of self-organization.
The implied "self" in this case is pure consciousness in dynamic evolution through multiple forms in multiple universes. The centrality of the self is purely a metaphor for its importance -- the self-organizing totality of psychic functioning, dynamic psychic structure. The self that does not exist is 'no-self'. This is the great Mystery at the core. Different people conceive it in different ways, including mandalas. Self is discovered in its own creative process.
Without neurological 'free will' Jung's notion falters. But self or no-self theories predate Buddhism and other Asian philosophies, and have always existed side by side. Sure, we can grow or wallow in given events, but Hillman suggests we give up antiquated notions of an over-achieving heroic ego, which we might call "the father of all illusions." Rather than inevitable, he sees events as somehow dependent on our innate future-shaping character -- the psychic connection between past and future.
Archaeology of the Mind
What is beyond the virtual realities of the dialogical self and a multistate paradigm of human nature? Arguably, it begs the question, is 'self' or 'Self' an archetype, or not, or another layer of delusory content, including its symbols, ageless wisdom figures, and formless varieties: Sage, Christ, King, Queen, Puer/Senex, Crone, Wise Sage, Holy Child. Traditionally, in their highest form, they are images of the man or woman who has realized the Self as goal of the spiritual journey.
Non-dual systems still differentiate between individual ego-self and innate universal self.
How do we distinguish the 'I' of personal identity? The basis of the human psyche seems to be a collective of selves--a multimind in a multiverse. Independent and autonomous, they relate with one another mostly unknown to the outer awareness. It invites re-imagining the self as any number of faces...and perhaps in this regard our genealogy is the most tangible example.
The Elder understands this journey toward Self-realization, even if still far from such personal realization. The task becomes one of "catching ourselves in the act" of creating our own "reality" from the flow of events. Human truth is always an engagement of mind with experience.
The sociological message is that we don't have to fear the collapse of what we think we are.
We don't need to fear the collapse of our personalistic belief system, nor our belief in absolute truth. Such ideas may be illusory, but not useless. We can know the universal wisdom path and also understand the fictions behind our ideas about all that.
It is analogous to asking in astrophysics if the sun powers itself or actually collects energy from the galaxy, as some models suggest. The art of emptying psychic contents is not so much a psychological or developmental process as much as an experiential grasp of allowing life to move through us.
We cannot grasp the Self with the mind or think our way to the Self. The self remains profoundly unconscious because our minds are finite. We cannot have infinite thoughts. But knowing that comes from experience, not thinking, transcends the finite mind.
Agents of Destiny
The archetypes of the collective unconscious are arrayed behind the scenes of current worldwide conditions, of crisis and confusion. They mirror our own states back at us, whether we perceive them as such or interpret them plausibly or not. The noise of ordinary consciousness and beliefs drowns out the signal.
Unconsciousness is the background of our ordinary and subliminal awareness. Our organism is very much at the center of such effects. The organismic source is our human bodies and the focus of human consciousness. We cannot know the ultimate nature of matter itself. It informs how we comport ourselves.
The fantasy principle dethrones reality, but can be dissociative or compensatory. The human mind is a meme-scape. Pre-conceived concepts vie with structures, concepts with images. Like scientists who ignore assumed truths, we leapfrog over our beliefs and personality deficits, claiming idiosyncratic imagination is literal reality. It couldn't be further from the truth and symbolism is utterly lost.
The metaphor that might heal us enslaves us. Root metaphors unconsciously frame other facets of meaning. Metaphors create values that create history. Befriending our productivity in creative art and dream images is a therapeutic act of image production. Subject and object unfolds simultaneously through sensation much like self and world unfold our experience of ourselves in the world as bare life and naked awareness.
Hillman imagines dream as a site of orientation, a grounding, when we stick to the image of the dream, not reductionism, interpretation, and analysis. The image precedes thought; the dream is a poetic space, a journey beyond opposites like good and evil, love and hate. We can engage the image directly, since both art and dream defy reductionistic interpretations.
Reframing consciousness, the artist seeks every way to navigate mind, and explore its domains. Intuition provides insight and a connective link to the source of existence. Imagination breaks through borders and barriers, giving life to extended vision captured by gesture. It is perhaps our greatest accomplishment that we now understand the history and nature of our universe as an undivided whole.
Mystery Landscape
In Understanding Media (1964), Marshall McLuhan suggested that, "the artist is always engaged in writing a detailed history of the future because [s]he is the only person aware of the nature of the present..." We are each illuminated only to the extent that the light comes through us.
He thought the artist in any field, scientific or humanistic, grasps the implications of their actions and of new knowledge in their own time, thus expressing integral awareness, throughout different domains of resolution. The soul calls for alternative stories, for creative expression as a means of healing split life and split cosmos.
McLuhan's tetrads were a poetic device expressing the possibilities of analysis for generating multiple interpretations that intersect or partially overlap, yet remain distinct, complementary and supplementary. They are four simultaneous modes of exploring and expressing process -- mind-maps or creative tools for for thought and investigation.
A similar contrasts exists between Jungian and the more poetic or archetypal post-Jungian thought, which extends, enlarges, and moves Jung's ideas out of the consulting room and into the world at large with its politics and problems. Some things get retrieved, while others are obsolesced; some are enhanced while others reverse into their unconscious opposites.
Enhancement amplifies by association; retrieval resurrects old values and insight that didn't work so well the first time around; obsolescence means previously important phenomena get ignored or moved to the periphery; reversal is like the enantiodromia of Jung and Heraclitus where the pendulum swings into its opposite creating new problems. Superabundance of any force inevitably produces its opposite as we see in the political climate.
"The West is so eager to appear Eastern in everything and is so keen on the inner trip. In the Electric Age, by the way, in the Electric Age the whole world is taking the inner trip; because of the circuit, the feedback, the electric technology is psychedelic. So the Western world is going Eastern in that sense of inner trip. Well, the old West used to be outer exploration, all was the outer world. Now it’s the inner world..." (McLuhan)
“We are being taken on an inner trip, into our own inner feelings, which involve us, in depth, in things that had formerly been merely superficial, visual, external, and detached from our own beings.”
Old Messages in New Media
There could hardly be an older message. The Western world went Eastern in the sense of the inner trip -- which is also a dissociation. Such ideas get adopted by new age thought which retrieves the esoterics of the past in an eclectic mash-up that makes them unintegratable. It hurls consciousness into outmoded realms, so people wind up essentially living in by-gone centuries of imagination.
Archaic and medieval thought unshackled by religious tradition lacks coherence. Instead of authentic or unique synthesis, such worldviews are idiosyncratic. Rather than truly new potential it is more or less warmed-over Theosophy. Such 'effects' are far more operational than any amount of wishful intentionality or vision boards. It amplifies immature ego and polarized beliefs. Not all metaphors bridge the gap between subject and object.
Thus, we get a neo-gnosticism with medieval thinking that rejects the negative skew and anti-material perfectionism of gnosticism yet demonizes the archons. As Jung noted, "gnosis is not gnosticism" and he vehemently denied being gnostic himself. They think they "know" because of their inner trip, but they don't know when they are self-deluded or the revelations are hollow, which is most of the time. This is misguided inner authority, as I have described elsewhere.
In this liminal, undefined habitat, creative non-fiction creates its own rules and explanations with narrative drive and structure. Creative functionality and interpretation is a dynamic that changes with time and locality. Mathematically, all time exists all of the time. All time effects all time, all the time. Every moment co-creates creates every other forward and back.
Archetypal Information
Images are the enfolded information of the subjective world. Images as simulations of possible reality relate to cause and effect. Informed patterns create a variety of themes and humanity's evolving habits.
Our brains and their architecture work in modeling the world around us and noumenal reality, where we try to influence the world of action by planning, strategy, and interaction. For example, a map is an analog of a landscape but completely different than the natural landscape. It is a transmogrification in psychic space when photon and field come together in the light.
A creative simulation of world and self plays with and mutates its possibilities of action within the analog mind. We role play potential scenarios through immersion to learn and assimilate information about the world. We engage presence through journeying and struggling with mythic and allegorical forms. Our sense of history is transformed by spirit infusing us with speech and action.
Connective chains of ideas and events hopefully culminate in the reader's self-discovery. More than a license to meander, it is a circulatio, a ritual passage, among all potential and underground aspects of the self, balancing the rational and intuitive mind with a principled conscience.
The etymological source of the word “therapy “ is the Greek therapeuin meaning to attend to, to treat, to heal. The term therapeutes first meant 'one who is attendant to the gods,' then later the related adjective therapeutikos carried the meaning of attending to heal, or treating in a spiritual or medical sense.
Organic First Nature
McLuhan said, the Western world is living through its past and the past of many forgotten cultures. Archaic humans experienced no past and no history. But collective cultures demand individuals repress and subordinate themselves, their individuality, and even their creativity. Our artifacts, extensions of our human body, and invisible grounds impose second nature on our wild body.
Technologies create these effects in the sense that, "we shape our tools and thereafter they shape us." (Center for the Study of Digital Life) Infotainment has hijacked full sensory engagement with the universal experience and simultaneity of the "inner trip" (like television) and automatic behavior with interactive media, which act like drugs. The open road became the inner trip as all experience is a metamorphosing of reality.
Awareness of Process
More information doesn't equate with more understanding and assimilation and may harm not improve relations. They “amplify and accelerate existing processes.” McLuhan suggested reversing the esoterics of the "inner trip" by "the maximum participation of all the senses." The interplay of all the senses unifies the imaginative life.
“Electric technology, by virtue of its immediate relation to our nervous system, is itself a sort of inner trip, with drugs playing the role of sub-plot or alternative mode. It may well appear a few years hence that the panic about psychedelic drugs relates less to the chemistry than to the hidden terrors which people feel in the presence of electric technology.” (Marshall McLuhan, June 1974 (From a previously unpublished letter.)
Choices are usually limited or contextual. So, post-conventional models encourage unique creative approaches, beyond authority, punishment and reward, material power, approval, social contracts or obligations, or even enlightened self-interest. We must learn to accept individual responsibility for collective evil.
Our archaic origin remains ever present, the flowing movement of reality and our underlying source, a spaceless and timeless zero-dimensional realm. This enfolded dimension supports the manifest world of material structure. Universal consciousness lies at the current limits of physical science. Is it the fundamental form of processes underlying the universe?
Archaic man was pre-conscious, fused with world and universe. Even at the most primitive stage we have to discern right from wrong actions. The Shadow always presents a divergent, oblique view and problematic interactions. Navigating the dark places inside our soul we come to terms with darkness to pass through toward wholeness.
Soul is our direct and immediate felt-sense of uniqueness when we are present to our depths. It is associated with physical and emotional healing, religion, imagination, art, aesthetics, story, myth, and mystery. We have concerns that we cannot explain but that we feel are crucial to life, extending insight into new areas.
Psyche's embedded structures are 'mutations' with their own characteristics and anatomy which we metabolize and absorb as the simultaneity of association. The body symbolically turns itself inside out and discovers its more-than-metaphorical reversible relation with the world and cosmos -- Being, the whole itself. The self is the world. Hillman’s concern is that personal soul-making is ultimately ineffective without complimentary attention to the world soul.
De-structuring, or destratification by immersion in the flow of psychic imagery through identification with more and more primal forms or patterns leads toward creative emergence of an expanded state. Moral dilemmas and cognitive dissonance challenge our value system. Wholeness demands the lower as well as the higher concepts. This creativity can become a stabilized trait of a self-actualizing individual.
We are all familiar with religious images of ascent and descent to various heavens and hells. But the psychological process of descent is more than a 'dark night of the soul.' It is a withdrawl of the ego from worldly involvement and a dark and dangerous descent to the archaic dynamic ground (Washburn).
In Anatomy of the Psyche, Edward Edinger summarizes seven major aspects of this dynamic symbolism: (1) return to the womb or primal state; (2) dissolution, dispersal, dismemberment; (3) containment of a lesser thing by a greater; (4) rebirth, rejuvenation, immersion in the creative energy flow; (5) purification ordeal; (6) solution of problems; and (7) melting or softening process.
These different aspects overlap. Several or all of them may make up different facets of a single experience. Basically it is the ego's confrontation with the unconscious that brings it about. Ego submits in the service of transcendence to more primitive modes of functioning to recollect what has been repressed, forgotten, and denied. We 'die to the world' to experience a pivotal event under the influence of numinous power: the long and difficult opening of the prepersonal unconscious.
Symptoms include bizarre and morbid states, dread, estrangement, alienation, anxiety, disturbed thoughts, eruption of instincts, dysregulation, fragmentation, conflict and ego death. But, rather than degenerative, such symptoms eventually lead to coherence of the whole being and a new relationship between psyche, mythos and logos.
Solar myths arose with civilization and agriculture. Before that the Moon governed our rhythms for aeons. Solar myths heralded the appearance of the light of consciousness and mental structure and ethical separation of good and evil -- and tension of dualistic opposites.
Myth brings objective meaning to psychic events, beyond the history of an individual. Hillman claimed it 'silvers' the psychic mirror, allowing reflection. Stace (1960) identifies the results of such transformation: 1) unity of all things; 2) transformation of space and time; 3) deeply felt positive mood; 4) sacredness; 5) objectivity and reality; 6) paradoxicality; 7) alleged ineffability; 8) transiency, and 9) persisting positive changes in subsequent behavior.
Archetypal Matrix
Our original source is uncreated and uncreatable. Both psyche and cosmos come from the 'cosmic womb,' or source field and continue unfolding from each and every moment. Archaic or primeval non-dimensional root structure (like deep dreamless sleep) orients us with modalities of experience in space and time. This pre-history is shrouded in mystery and hidden activity in the brain and body -- unrecognized dimensions of silence.
In trance there is a possibility of becoming animal, but also vegetal and all things of nature, as ambiguous human attributes fall away. Jung suggested at the most archaic level, "There is no difference in principle between the animal and the human psyche. The kinship of the two is too obvious." (Letters Vol. II, Pages 372-373).
"Man's original fusion with the world ... has its best known anthropological expression in totemism which regards a certain animal as an ancestor, a friend, or some kind of powerful and providential being ... The same phenomenon of fusion as originally existed between man and the world also obtains between the individual and the group ..." (Neumann, 1954)
"Since the archetypes are the instinctual forms of mental behavior it is quite certain that, inasmuch as animals possess a "mind," their mind also follows archetypal patterns, and presumably the same that are operative in the human mind." (Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 372-373).
Transcendent energies are inherent in this ground of universe itself. This is a primordial, not a simulated reality. Symbols enrich rather than impoverish human experience. It is the real reality beneath the socially constructed veneer; not a perversion of reality, but its core. It is real, nameless, and unknowable, as the source of the physical world.
Archetypes are like metaphysical images of consciousness; they exist preconsciously and are only known by their effects. Agents of the ground, they are rooted beyond being or existence. When psychic contents come up from the preconscious structure of the psyche, they may become part of the conscious attitude of individual personality.
Progoff identified archetypes as "fundamental patterns of symbol formation." Present since ancient days, "they grow out of the nature of the psyche in its most rudimentary form." These primordial images, recurrent in human history are then passed on to future generations as "part of a collective inheritance"; a collective unconscious. Jung sees these as "inherited pathways" not "inherited ideas" (Progoff 1973, 1952:59).
Archaic man still lives within us. Archaic ego as in mythical times is present only in germ, without fixed boundaries and still interwoven wholly with the world and nature. The primitive observer or "natural man" is conditioned to perceive objects and relations between objects.
'Primitive' is not a pejorative; it just means 'original' in an immersive relationship to the world it finds itself in -- visible and hidden forms of the world and body that demand reconciliation. This is our primal heritage, an organic and natural relationship with our own body and its voice as organisms, before being individuals -- original intelligence.
Dudjom Lingpa describes his experience in a retreat: "Moreover I had visionary experiences akin to seeing smoke, optical illusions, stars, and apparent clear light. Relying on the inconceivable symbolic appearances of clear light, the irreversible, faultless wisdom of awareness rose in my mindstream."
Magical Dreamtime
Primal man made his environment by magic rituals that were re-enactments and dramatizations of the creative process by which the world comes into being. Even Renaissance art was trying to capture the values of the past technologically, but 21st Century art is a holographic time machine. Your beliefs determine what century you are inhabiting. Technology has the power to be environmental entirely independent of art as environmental.
We don't dwell in a realm of immediacy, but in a world of symbolic forms. Magical structure first appeared in hunting rituals, fused with nature, animism, and rudimentary self-image. Sympathetic magic is a highly-emotional one-dimensional dream-like state, an immediacy where nothing is 'accidental' and everything is animated with spirit. Anima is world-as-imagination, world-coming-to-be, soul's imaginative display -- the magical world.
Masks and mask-wearing are part of the by-product of religious practice. The relic of such ornamentation and defense continue in the archetype of persona, modification of the sense of self in culture. Symbolic associations make up and modulate our humanity, identity, and behavior. But what aboriginals think is magic or possible is very different from moderns. For example, they can project their being distances and communicate.
Animism gives rise to a practical need for controlling the world. Ability to sense the surrounding world changed. Magic is governed by a principle of omnipotent thought. It attaches a mental attitude with a specific action and intent. Confluence of feelings, reflection, and rudimentary theories of consciousness and death gave rise to primal burial rites.
We tend to imagine that we emerge from and return to a non-existent Source. Imagination engages with antiquity. From the time of the Neanderthals and Cro-Magnon, notions of living ancestry and some sort of afterlife have permeated the psyche and culture of Homo sapiens. Research into cross-cultural burial practices and propitiatory rituals, including sacrificial death, has been interpreted to indicate beliefs in a netherworld existence, populated by nature spirits and ancestors.
Dreams are psyche's permeable membrane -- a holographic projection of the mystery of being. Ancestral images in dreams can be projections, but might carry objective information. A unified concept of the individual does not separate us from the environment, or relatives, clan or ancestors. Ancestors are the Dark Matter of our corporeal being.
Trance, hypnosis, and psychoactive plants can produce experiences of a plenum or void, interpreted as a separate reality with spiritual attributes. The nature and locale of such a
netherworld and afterlife remains the object of speculation, despite ghostly phenomena.
Each culture has had its answer throughout the ages. Such absolute space has been equated with the groundstate of primordial mind and virtual light (noumenal) beyond the phenomenal.
Altered states and dreams gave rise to the notion that the stone cold abyss is an underworld of the dead–or an Elysian field. Then, as now, mortuary rituals helped the living endure separation. The afterlife says more about our imaginal and conceptual ideas about it than its literal reality as a physical or transcendental realm. Our concepts of posthumous existence can be literal, figurative and/or metaphorical. From science to theology to literature, we
find ideas about life after death surfacing time and time again.
http://ionamiller2017.weebly.com/afterlife.html
We still speculate on life that persists after death and how or what that might mean in spiritual, psychological, and scientific terms. This is not mere semantics or metaphysical narrative. A world seen through the lens of divine order is very different from one rooted in self-organizing chaos and complexity. Physical law and divine agency continue to
quarrel in our unconscious minds, which retain archaic beliefs.
The Myth-ing Link
The Gnostics say the gods wept when they left the Absolute. They descend before they ascend to the light, and that is the prototype of human mythical life, also. Mythic structure, systems of metaphysical realism, is highly-imaginative archetypal vision reflecting soul infused meaning, two-dimensional polarities, long and short cycles, and separation from nature. It is imagistic, re-enactive, and reflective with corresponding meaning and significance. It is more phenomenological than theological.
Eliade describes the dichotomy mankind erects between sacred and profane. The hallowed nature of many temples is older. When the earth was struck by "fire from the gods", it was designated as holy ground. Areas hit by lightning, "thunderstones." or a meteorite gave rise to sacred status.
Often the meteorite, cosmic debris, itself was revered, as it is today in Mecca. The goddess mother Cybele was represented by meteorite. The main statue of the Artemis Temple at Ephesus may have been a black meteorite because she was said to have fallen from the sky. These artifacts of heaven, prototypical sacred stones, had protective, medicinal, and revelatory qualities.
Myth is poetic, symbolic and metaphorical. But mythic literalism can be rigid, dogmatic and intolerant. Being coerced into a social pattern is a living death for an individual.
"A mythological canon is an organization of symbols, ineffable in import, by which the energies of aspiration are evoked and gathered toward a focus. The message leaps from heart to heart by way of the brain, and where the brain is unpersuaded, the message cannot pass. The life, then, is untouched. For those in whom a local mythology still works, there is an experience both of accord with the social order, and of harmony with the universe. For those, however, in whom the authorized signs no longer work––or, if working, produce deviant effects––there follows inevitably a sense both of dissociation from the local social nexus and of quest, within and without, for life which the brain takes to be for 'meaning.’ "
~ Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God, Vol. IV: Creative Mythology, (New York: Viking Penguin/Arkana, 1991) p. 5.
Jung believed we could awaken from our dreams by individuation by opening channels to the archetypes and collective unconscious to penetrate our archaic amnesia. But the deliberate attrition of consciousness appears pathological to the ordinary mind.
Rationality
Aristotle and others extolled reason over mystery. The Enlightenment repudiated myth, but not those of religion. But is there a transcendent unity to religions that do not share the same myths, creation myths and otherwise? They may resemble in essence yet differ wildly in exoteric and esoteric aspects.
Revealed religions do not share epistemologies and metaphysics, but claim to transcend intuitive intellect and paradox of language and conceptualization. Metaphysics and dogmas are theoristic tendencies. Only the transcendent dimension at the core of religious form is its life-giving sap.
But what is the nature of that generic essence? It is a perception of underlying Unity of knower and known. Absolute unity defies even that as all-potential. What is shared is transcendence of the manifest world and cannot be concretely apprehended. But the transcendent, abstract, and generic must be approached via forms that close the gap. Intuition can produce leaps in insight or groundless speculation.
Myth and religion seem coherent only because they rely on unity of feeling, not logic. We have images of feelings and feelings of images that help reveal the structures and myths underlying them. As therapy shows, if the image makes the feeling, we can change the image to change the feelings. What the heart feels, the mind thinks. Even scientists can compartmentalize their beliefs. Reductionists, phenomenologists, deists. agnostics, and atheists have their own narratives. But phenomena are not noumena.
Primary religions develop organically from collective consciousness with no scriptural basis. As animals, we can only be so rational, so we use symbolism to encode our knowledge in cultural forms. Various threads weave the symbolic net, including 'scientific method'. The esoteric minority may realize their root through experience or identification even if they cannot absolutely validate it.
All dogmatic monotheistic religions developed from the polytheistic. When the gods were rationalized out of consciousness, Jung said they had become diseases. They were rediscovered in the interior depths of the unconscious as psychic facts. Their capacity to re-enchant the world was revived.
An integral approach doesn't pit them against one another. Mental structures include reason, questioning, analysis, perspective, rights, even madness. Integral structure includes embodiment with authentic dwelling as insight and recognition of the whole -- transparent to transcendence (Gebser), an expanded experiential foundation for existence and greater Presence.
Rational & Irrational Experiences
Complete rationality is a Utopian ideal that doesn't exist. Jung wrote in Psychological Types that objective values are established by the everyday experience of external facts and inner, psychological facts.
It is not the work of the individual subject, but the product of human history, but “… nothing other than the expression of man’s adaptability to average occurrences, which have gradually become deposited in firmly established complexes of ideas that constitute our objective values. Thus the laws of reason are the laws that designate and govern the average."
Jung defined irrational as not grounded on reason like known and unknown elementary facts. The irrational is an existential factor pushed further out of sight by an increasingly elaborate rationalized explanation. It finally makes the explanation so complicated that it passes our powers of comprehension.
All structures are emergent and remain existent today, even if unconscious. Thus, we have vital, psychological, and conceptual selves. Creative interpretations dive deeper into the historical undercurrents of consciousness and our perceptual styles and latent potentials and insight.
To experience an integral life, we must bring awareness to our lived participation at all levels. The integral structure transcends rational formulations with multiple perspectives, and direct, transrational realizations. Lost and repressed potentials re-emerge in higher integrative unity.
Our Invisible History & Primary Reality
There are far too many physics theories for the primary reality. This existential 'disappearing act' is recapitulated in matter, as well as consciousness. The question remains if matter is made of objective information and how it correlates or not with the binding energy of consciousness phenomena to biological brain functions.
Non-biological consciousness, a unifying force that resolves energy existing in multiple forms remains to be found, but seems interconnected with mind-body. What does or doesn't register at the level of conscious awareness because it is too complex and therefore primordial and unknowable to the volitional knower?
Subliminal Self-Awareness
Consciousness, the interior foundation, is primary, the 'light' of primordial awareness; the substance of the light is consciousness; awareness is trained. Conditioned consciousness is normal. Pure awareness as individual consciousness (activated awareness) never moves.
A Density of Meanings
Any form of control -- magic, myth, rationality -- is a secondary reality with control requirements. Secondary consciousness creates forms out of pure formlessness. We cannot play with what we genuinely do not know. It can only be directed through primary reality.
Primary reality, experiential illumination of the primary reality, is effortless (unrestricted events with no border control), while secondary reality (desire, emotion, belief, trust) takes effort and creates duality and beliefs. 'Getting it' conceptually is not the same as getting greater Presence experientially. Primordial awareness becomes a conscious experiencer.
Unconditioned consciousness is primary reality while conscious awareness is secondary reality and self-referencing. In the quantum and sub-quantum domains there are no physical properties, just effects of virtual particle flux.
Nonlocality mirrors integral consciousness. There is no solid matter, just potentialities, possibilities, superpositions. Neither materially nor biologically produced, consciousness remains unchanged no matter what the brain produces or doesn't produce. But it is impersonally embedded in the fabric of our substance. This canvas remains consistent and never alters.
The underlying psychic process remains hidden from view and is dramatized in "mysteries" and "sacraments.” They are reinforced by religious teachings, exercises, meditations, and acts of sacrifice. The celebrant plunges so deeply into the sphere of the mystery that s/he becomes conscious of intimate connections with mythic happenings.
The real nature of psychic processes transcends consciousness, as much as the mysteries of life or matter. Jung's view of psyche and 'psychic' alludes to the densest darkness imaginable -- biological 'dark matter', or black holes. It can be correlated with Void Structure, virtual vacuum, and virtual photon flux.
Much of what Jung describes as “individuation” is actually “self-transcendence.” Self-transcendence is the dissolution of the self-actualized individual into the “whole.” “Whole” in the collective consciousness includes Divine Consciousness - God. It is the “Awakening” or “Enlightenment” process, primordial awareness. This process is not realizing we exist within the whole, but the individual dissolving “self” and becoming one with the “whole.”
"The deeper layers of the psyche lose their individual uniqueness as they retreat farther and farther into darkness. Lower down; that is to say as they approach the autonomous functional systems, they become increasingly collective until they are universalized and extinguished in the body's materiality, i.e., in chemical substances. The body's carbon is simply carbon. Hence *at bottom' the psyche is simply “world.”
~Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams and Reflections.
A perennial theme of humankind, transformation as a basic change in character, cognition, and direction has been explored in religion, psychology and art. There is individual and collective transformation. Dependence on the later erodes individuality.
Classical metaphors of dynamic transformations of lifestyle, soul and spirit include:
1. dream sleep to awakening;
2. illusion to realization;
3. darkness (or blindness) to enlightenment;
4. imprisonment to liberation;
5. fragmentation to wholeness (unifying);
6. separation to oneness (unifying);
7. journey to destination (arriving);
8. being in exile to coming home (returning);
9. from seed to flowering or fruiting plant or tree (unfolding);
10. from death to rebirth (renewal, resurrection, eternal return).
Rites of passage, as a summons to wisdom, can include a psychological and sacred dimension. It addresses the question of how a person finds a personal path worthy of the soul. We're taught to strive for this mythic "thing" at the physical, mental, and spiritual level. Transformation is thorough, radical and dramatic power that can be deployed for good or ill.
Classically, 'transformation' describes the path from initiation to liberation from social conformity. It helps us let go of the worn out to find deep dialogue with psyche, adventure and renewed life. The process is mediated by symbols and imagery. If they arise organically ego is transformed; if they are imposed ego is hijacked.
Solitude is the furnace of authentic transformation. Personal growth is an individual process of self-determination. In this sense, it is incompatible with group programming. But the real self as divergent perceptions and dynamic understanding of interrelationships is dangerous to tradition, the church, the state, and the crowd.
In psychology, transformation has been curiously defined as "the procedure used when unconscious desires or urges are costumed in order to emerge in consciousness." Psychobiological transformation is a key theme in depth psychologies.
It begins at the point where there is no hope and leads through overwhelming challenges, fraught with depression, fragmentation, dissociation, resistance, symptoms, pain and anxiety. We are at our most vulnerable at the threshold of transformation, including technological trauma. New technologies create new environments.
Awareness, Feeling & Intuition
The key to personal transformation is story transformation. But more than just a different "narrative," or figure, it is about is the 'ground' that hasn't been recognized. This includes the relationship between technology and art. In integral awareness, consciousness is not fragmented by repression. All is one and that oneness is ourselves. What is invisible now needs to be remembered at the cultural not just individual level, inspiring self-awareness, healing, and discovery.
"Its [the Unconscious] answer does not necessarily refer to that piece of reality you have in mind, it is reacting to the whole man and brings into sight what the whole man should know, in other words, it compensates for an insight lacking in consciousness." ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 360-361.
"Whenever and wherever you turn to some extent towards the unconscious it seldom or never answers as one would expect; it is rather as if nature itself were answering." ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 360-361.
Behind, Beneath & Between the Surface
The detailed history of the future includes awareness of the unused possibilities of the present. But rather than forecasting from Big Data, we simply notice what's going on in the present, aware as we can be of what we're missing, consciously and unconsciously with a sort of spiral thinking.
Spirals are symbolic metaphors for a never-ending journey of discovery and rediscovery. Spiral structure involves feedback and feedforward, advancing and retreating along several dimensions and reversals of figure and ground. The spiral is a frame for observation of current situational reality and multiple perspectives on the natural world, not a theory in itself.
The spiral structure of purely physical and biological phenomena is primarily played out in physical space, whereas the spiral structures of philosophy, culture, human thought, scholarship and artistic expression involve the time dimension. The movement back and forth in these domains entails the transitions from the present back to the past or forward into the future and vice-versa from the past and the future to the present. The spiral structure unites the past, the present, and the future. According to McLuhan, “We live in post-history in the sense that all pasts that ever were are now present to our consciousness and that all the futures that will be are here now.” He also suggested that, “the future of the future is the present.” (Oldenhof, Logan)
http://www.mdpi.com/2409-9287/2/2/9/htm
We attempt to expose the "hidden ground" behind important areas of our lives. We dig down to what is "not seen," rather than just another way of seeing. In The Mechanical Bride, McLuhan defines 'art' as both a 'storehouse of achieved values' and 'the antennae of new awareness and discovery', enabling 'a unified and an inclusive consciousness in which there is easy commerce between old and new' (MB 87).
McLuhan noted that every work of art, in its repeated use, becomes a technology. He didn't distinguish between art and science 'in any field, scientific or humanistic.' The science-artists becomes one who 'grasps the implications of his actions and of new knowledge in his own time' (UM 65). He suggests 'probing' the unconscious environment, which McLuhan tells us, has utility across all fields of the arts and sciences.
http://www.lightthroughmcluhan.org/art.html
Transformation is symbolic, life-changing -- a massive reorganization of attitudes, behaviors, and meaning. Metamorphosis is the classic metaphor of major life passages and restructuring. Latent potentials emerge and outworn characteristics decline. Some qualities are hidden until our true nature is revealed as a new form of life and self-identity.
Archetypal and Imaginal psychology urge us to move beyond the monotheistic myth of self-domination by the abstract concepts of a rational heroic ego, self, or god. James Hillman noted the ego too is an image. It makes problems to solve them with will and intentionality, but that is an illusory perspective.
Consciousness is not based on concepts of ego or self, though it has been identified as such. Archetypes generate the transformational images and the universal material of myth and drama, but they bear the mark of personal and cultural conditioning. They provide archaic and timeless meaning.
Hillman dubs ego a "myth of inflation", not the secret key to the development of consciousness, but a source of fallacies, defining its literal fantasies as reality. In A Blue Fire (pg. 34), he suggests, "placing in abeyance such metaphors as: choice and light, problem solving and reality testing, strengthening, developing, controlling, progressing." He condemns new age insistence on transformation - sloughing off the old self and interpretive schemes for an idealization that is essentially another self-delusion, or premature transcendental escapism.
Self-Actualization: Realizing Our Potential
Jung (CW 12, par. 32) cautioned that we must be alone to find out what it is that supports us when we can no longer support ourselves. Only this experience, he said, gives us an indestructible foundation. "Individuation and collectivity are a pair of opposites, two divergent destinies. They are related to one another by guilt."
He concludes, "we must be able to stand alone vis a vis the unconscious for better or worse." (Letters, Vol 1, p. 458-459) Jung also notes, "Individuation is just ordinary life and what you are made conscious of." (Letters, Vol. 1, pg. 442) We may draw our energy from a quiet, inner life or a noisy outer life. It isn't rare, but it is a move toward self-actualization or self-realization. There are many names for the inward journey of the soul and formless state. The unspeakable ultimate realm is contained within the inner mirror.
The path from the oblivious to self-aware life is beset with obstacles. How do we know what a genuine transformative experience is? We transform ourselves by every act of self-knowing. Jung felt that self-realization was a natural process of transformation, orchestrated by the unconscious. The infinite depth of dynamic reality informs our worldview and personal sovereignty. Such is the journey of meaningful solitude into silence, ratified by the perennial wisdom.
Krishnamurti said, "To stand alone is to be uncorrupted, innocent, free of all tradition, of dogma, of opinion, of what another says, and so on. . . .What matters is to understand for oneself, not through the direction of others, the total content of consciousness, which is not conditioned, which is the result of society, of religion, of various impacts, impressions, memories -- to understand all of that conditioning and be free of it. But there is no "how" to be free. If you ask 'how' to be free, you are not listening."
Kahlil Gibran claimed, "Knowledge of the self is the mother of all knowledge. So it is incumbent on me to know my self, to know it completely, to know its minutiae, its characteristics, its subtleties, and its very atoms."
Yogananda suggests that self-realization is "to know truth through yourself, and not through others." Ramana Maharshi says, "your own Self-Realization is the greatest service you can render the world."
The Dalai Lama notess, "With realization of one's own potential and self-confidence in one's ability, one can build a better world." Rumi was poetic: "I have been a seeker and I still am, but I stopped asking the books and the stars. I started listening to the teaching of my Soul."
Hermann Hesse and others, such as Thoreau, Emerson and Whitman, echo this approach in their own writings.
Hesse felt that, "We must become so alone, so absolutely alone, that we withdraw into our innermost self. It is a way of bitter suffering. But then our solitude is overcome, we are no longer alone and we find that our innermost self is the spirit, that it is God, the indivisible. And suddenly we find ourselves in the midst of the world, yet undisturbed by its multiplicity, for in our innermost soul, we know ourselves to be one with all beings."
“Transformation connotes a more-or-less dramatic shift in the context of an individual's meaning system, beyond any attempts to re-brand or commercialize the field. Real transformation takes place in the furnace of the heart. However, institutional transformation can mean an imposed or enforced social change.
In McLuhan's vernacular, the "invisible" environment of new technologies creates an "erosion", not enhancement, of the conscious and unconscious -- by means of "audience as workforce." We unconsciously conform to such environments. The subconscious works on emotion. Business strategy is transformed into emotion.
Transformation is a model of a process. In this theory, personal and social transformation promotes self-actualization and compassionate service. Radical change involves new habits, range of emotions, and worldview -- concerns, interests, goals, ambitions, practices, and behaviors. A reordering of values can change the basis of self-identity.
Significant transformation can mean a radical reorganization of one’s identity, meaning, and purpose in life -- a turning point -- transformations of earlier worldviews. Embodied transformation sustains over time. Wisdom to know the difference between one’s ego and one’s Self is embodied in your individuality.
REF
Cabot, Todd
https://www.academia.edu/19914211/Hekate_Demeter_and_Persephone_Eleusinia_on_the_Tree_of_Life
The Mind of Consciousness By Ray Morose
https://books.google.com/books?id=Wy-J20unGzQC&pg=PA371&lpg=PA371&dq=binding+energy+of+consciousness&source=bl&ots=dnAE2AJy0S&sig=BXtVj5HcqbV06CEepMp6stjEEPs&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjhr97LmrTUAhWB4yYKHQ-6BDgQ6AEIODAD#v=onepage&q=binding%20energy%20of%20consciousness&f=false
The transcendent unity of religions
https://archive.org/stream/pdfy-lBasIMfuA724PVLO/Frithjof%20Schuon%20-%20The%20Transcendent%20Unity%20of%20Religions#page/n37/mode/1up
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/something-from-nothing-vacuum-can-yield-flashes-of-light/
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16095-its-confirmed-matter-is-merely-vacuum-fluctuations/
https://www.academia.edu/20044342/Dreams_-_Deleuze_and_Hillman
http://www.jungatlanta.com/articles/summer13-the-sage.pdf
Cabot, Todd
https://www.academia.edu/19914211/Hekate_Demeter_and_Persephone_Eleusinia_on_the_Tree_of_Life
The Mind of Consciousness By Ray Morose
https://books.google.com/books?id=Wy-J20unGzQC&pg=PA371&lpg=PA371&dq=binding+energy+of+consciousness&source=bl&ots=dnAE2AJy0S&sig=BXtVj5HcqbV06CEepMp6stjEEPs&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjhr97LmrTUAhWB4yYKHQ-6BDgQ6AEIODAD#v=onepage&q=binding%20energy%20of%20consciousness&f=false
The transcendent unity of religions
https://archive.org/stream/pdfy-lBasIMfuA724PVLO/Frithjof%20Schuon%20-%20The%20Transcendent%20Unity%20of%20Religions#page/n37/mode/1up
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/something-from-nothing-vacuum-can-yield-flashes-of-light/
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16095-its-confirmed-matter-is-merely-vacuum-fluctuations/
https://www.academia.edu/20044342/Dreams_-_Deleuze_and_Hillman
http://www.jungatlanta.com/articles/summer13-the-sage.pdf
It is easy to squander our lives in hundreds of different things and to completely lose sight of the fact that we each have a particular purpose, unique to ourselves. It is a waste, a complete waste, to have, let’s say, a scholar, spend his days as a construction worker. Neither of them is more valuable than the other. We need both scholars and construction workers.
There is an innate talent, a divine seed within each of us, in our nature, that with the right conditions and nurturing allows us to flourish into the being we are meant to be, to live our singular purpose, the one thing only we can do and excel at. The seed of a cypress tree will never grow to be a cactus, no matter how much we want it to. In that seed all the possibilities of the cypress tree are contained, but the possibilities of a cactus plant are absent. Yet, we proceed, at least I have proceeded, much of our lives in a wasteful manner. We waste our talents and our lives in doing things that are not meant for us. We forget the one thing in the world we must never forget. And then, it is, as Rumi says, as if we have done nothing. And deep down we know it.
Imagine a person you consider to be self-actualized. A person who embodies purpose and who you know has manifested his or her potential. I can think of a few such individuals.
We have picked up things throughout our lives that do not belong to us. Expectations and attachments from our parents or from society that we need to shed if we are to be true to the core of our being and return to our essential nature. Only in this way can we make a significant contribution. I have realized, to my chagrin, that nobody can tell you what your unique purpose is, what that core of your being is. Not even the most gifted or intuitive of teachers. This, you must discover on your own and it takes unwavering focus, courage and effort to do so. Yet, I believe it is essential if our life is to have meaning.
If we recognize and fully realize our worth, we understand there is no other way to live but as our true selves, which have been eclipsed by countless foreign thoughts, attitudes, and values, an accumulation of clutter of all sorts. The only way to know ourselves is through silence, through regular, preferably daily, periods of silence and reflection. Being who we are is difficult and can be scary. Freedom is scary. So we avoid it. We spend our days, our years, our lifetime and our precious God given gifts and talents chasing after meaningless things, engaged in superficial work and entertainment just to avoid who we really are, and to avoid freedom.
https://www.moroccoworldnews.com/2016/09/196246/the-one-thing-in-the-world-you-must-never-forget/
There is an innate talent, a divine seed within each of us, in our nature, that with the right conditions and nurturing allows us to flourish into the being we are meant to be, to live our singular purpose, the one thing only we can do and excel at. The seed of a cypress tree will never grow to be a cactus, no matter how much we want it to. In that seed all the possibilities of the cypress tree are contained, but the possibilities of a cactus plant are absent. Yet, we proceed, at least I have proceeded, much of our lives in a wasteful manner. We waste our talents and our lives in doing things that are not meant for us. We forget the one thing in the world we must never forget. And then, it is, as Rumi says, as if we have done nothing. And deep down we know it.
Imagine a person you consider to be self-actualized. A person who embodies purpose and who you know has manifested his or her potential. I can think of a few such individuals.
We have picked up things throughout our lives that do not belong to us. Expectations and attachments from our parents or from society that we need to shed if we are to be true to the core of our being and return to our essential nature. Only in this way can we make a significant contribution. I have realized, to my chagrin, that nobody can tell you what your unique purpose is, what that core of your being is. Not even the most gifted or intuitive of teachers. This, you must discover on your own and it takes unwavering focus, courage and effort to do so. Yet, I believe it is essential if our life is to have meaning.
If we recognize and fully realize our worth, we understand there is no other way to live but as our true selves, which have been eclipsed by countless foreign thoughts, attitudes, and values, an accumulation of clutter of all sorts. The only way to know ourselves is through silence, through regular, preferably daily, periods of silence and reflection. Being who we are is difficult and can be scary. Freedom is scary. So we avoid it. We spend our days, our years, our lifetime and our precious God given gifts and talents chasing after meaningless things, engaged in superficial work and entertainment just to avoid who we really are, and to avoid freedom.
https://www.moroccoworldnews.com/2016/09/196246/the-one-thing-in-the-world-you-must-never-forget/
UNCONSCIOUS LABYRINTHS
Paul Henrickson, 2017
[The following quote] describes, by chance, perhaps, my [PRH] approach to images...
"The goal of both psychological and biological development is self-realization or individuation. The process of individuation is a refinement from the many to the one, from undifferentiated unconsciousness to individual consciousness. Individuation is the quest for wholeness, the journey to become more and more conscious of our unique self. Transformative symbols are unconscious carriers of both the conscious and unconscious worlds." --Iona Miller
"The way towards a solution of our contemporary problems I seem to propose is in reality the process I have been forced into as a modern individual confronted with the social, moral, intellectual, and religious insufficiencies of our time I recognize the fact that I can give only one answer, namely mine, which is certainly not valid universally, but may be sufficient for a restricted number of contemporary individuals inasmuch as my main tenet contains nothing more than: Follow that will and that way which experience confirms to be your own, i.e., the true expression of your individuality.
As nobody can become aware of his individuality unless he is closely and responsibly related to his fellow beings, he is not withdrawing to an egoistic desert when he tries to find himself. He can only discover himself when he is deeply and unconditionally related to some, and generally related to a great many, individuals with whom he has a chance to compare and from whom he is able to discriminate himself." --Jung, Letters
Representing the early attachment of subject to image and its later disassociaton.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0Y6NPahlDE&list=PL06AE1E1E9FDDF981&index=41
Firstly, the video on the history of music, as seen by one individual, beautifully, and by
chance, parallel my understanding of the experiment I’ve been engaged upon now for three
years.
At Easter time a seven year-old flattered me by drawing with crayons his illustration of
Easter. In this drawing he explains his conception of horizontal space in the main by rather
automatically making marks with a crayon by merely going back and forth, from left to right.
As I gazed on this method I wondered what the lad might do were he to try to investigate
movements other than this frankly primitively somewhat automatic gesture.
So, I determined to move my then 70-odd mind-body into this 7 year-old and after about
three years I finally discovered the image which appears next. There are now, at last count
1,119 works which, I would suppose, represent the unintended graphical progression which
developed quite unconsciously and in pure response to the data provided by the marks,
whatever they may be, already there.
Paul Henrickson, 2017
[The following quote] describes, by chance, perhaps, my [PRH] approach to images...
"The goal of both psychological and biological development is self-realization or individuation. The process of individuation is a refinement from the many to the one, from undifferentiated unconsciousness to individual consciousness. Individuation is the quest for wholeness, the journey to become more and more conscious of our unique self. Transformative symbols are unconscious carriers of both the conscious and unconscious worlds." --Iona Miller
"The way towards a solution of our contemporary problems I seem to propose is in reality the process I have been forced into as a modern individual confronted with the social, moral, intellectual, and religious insufficiencies of our time I recognize the fact that I can give only one answer, namely mine, which is certainly not valid universally, but may be sufficient for a restricted number of contemporary individuals inasmuch as my main tenet contains nothing more than: Follow that will and that way which experience confirms to be your own, i.e., the true expression of your individuality.
As nobody can become aware of his individuality unless he is closely and responsibly related to his fellow beings, he is not withdrawing to an egoistic desert when he tries to find himself. He can only discover himself when he is deeply and unconditionally related to some, and generally related to a great many, individuals with whom he has a chance to compare and from whom he is able to discriminate himself." --Jung, Letters
Representing the early attachment of subject to image and its later disassociaton.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0Y6NPahlDE&list=PL06AE1E1E9FDDF981&index=41
Firstly, the video on the history of music, as seen by one individual, beautifully, and by
chance, parallel my understanding of the experiment I’ve been engaged upon now for three
years.
At Easter time a seven year-old flattered me by drawing with crayons his illustration of
Easter. In this drawing he explains his conception of horizontal space in the main by rather
automatically making marks with a crayon by merely going back and forth, from left to right.
As I gazed on this method I wondered what the lad might do were he to try to investigate
movements other than this frankly primitively somewhat automatic gesture.
So, I determined to move my then 70-odd mind-body into this 7 year-old and after about
three years I finally discovered the image which appears next. There are now, at last count
1,119 works which, I would suppose, represent the unintended graphical progression which
developed quite unconsciously and in pure response to the data provided by the marks,
whatever they may be, already there.
There was never a preconceived idea of what might appear. The demand was always that
any influential material was to be identified by what was here already and any change or
development would be based on that data only.
The result, therefore, is NEVER one of a pre-conceived notion. The work then becomes a
true representation of the evolutionary character of an aesthetic response, or series of
responses until the maker is finally satisfied that all chaos has been resolved.
It is this sense that the video attached seems a parallel to the development of the scratch.
--Paul Henrickson, Malta, 2017, letter
any influential material was to be identified by what was here already and any change or
development would be based on that data only.
The result, therefore, is NEVER one of a pre-conceived notion. The work then becomes a
true representation of the evolutionary character of an aesthetic response, or series of
responses until the maker is finally satisfied that all chaos has been resolved.
It is this sense that the video attached seems a parallel to the development of the scratch.
--Paul Henrickson, Malta, 2017, letter
Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 592-597
"Individuality"
The way towards a solution of our contemporary problems I seem to propose is in reality the process I have been forced into as a modern individual confronted with the social, moral, intellectual, and religious insufficiencies of our time I recognize the fact that I can give only one answer, namely mine, which is certainly not valid universally, but may be sufficient for a restricted number of contemporary individuals inasmuch as my main tenet contains nothing more than: Follow that will and that way which experience confirms to be your own, i.e., the true expression of your individuality.
As nobody can become aware of his individuality unless he is closely and responsibly related to his fellow beings, he is not withdrawing to an egoistic desert when he tries to find himself. He can only discover himself when he is deeply and unconditionally related to some, and generally related to a great many, individuals with whom he has a chance to compare and from whom he is able to discriminate himself.
If somebody in supreme egoism should withdraw to the solitude of Mt. Everest, he would discover a good deal
about the amenities of his lofty abode but as good as nothing about himself, i.e., nothing he could not have known before.
Man in general is in such a situation in so far as he is an animal gifted with self-reflection but without the possibility of comparing himself to another species of animal equally equipped with consciousness.
He is a top animal exiled on a tiny speck of planet in the Milky Way.
That is the reason why he does not know himself; he is cosmically isolated.
He can only state with certainty that he is no monkey, no bird, no fish, and no tree.
But what he positively is, remains obscure. Mankind today is dreaming of interstellar communications.
Could we contact the population of another star, we might find a means to learn something essential about ourselves.
Incidentally we are just living in a time when homo homini lupus threatens to become
an awful reality, and when we are in dire need to know beyond ourselves.
.
The science fiction about travelling to the moon or to Venus and Mars and the lore about Flying Saucers are effects of our dimly felt but none the less intense need to reach a new physical as well as spiritual basis beyond our actual conscious world.
Philosophers and psychologists of the XIXth and XXth centuries have tried to provide
a terra nova in ourselves, that is, the unconscious.
This is indeed a discovery which could give us a new orientation in many respects .
Whereas our fictions about Martians and Venusians are based upon nothing but mere speculations, the unconscious is within the reach of human experience.
It is almost tangible and thus more or less familiar to us, but on the other hand a strange existence difficult to understand.
If we may assume that what I call archetypes is a verifiable hypothesis, then we are confronted with autonomous animalia gifted with a sort of consciousness and psychic life of their own, which we can observe, at least partially, not only in living men but also in the historic course of many centuries .
Whether we call them gods, demons, or illusions, they exist and function and are born anew with every generation.
They have an enormous influence on individual as well as collective life, and despite their familiarity they are curiously non-human.
This latter characteristic is the reason why they were called gods and demons in the past and why they are understood in our "scientific" age as the psychic manifestations of the instincts, inasmuch as they represent habitual and universally occurring attitudes and thought-forms.
They are basic forms, but not the manifest, personified, or otherwise concretized images.
They have a high degree of autonomy, which does not disappear when the manifest images change.
When f.i. the belief in the god Wotan vanishes and nobody thinks of him any more, the phenomenon, called Wotan originally, remains; nothing changes but its name, as National Socialism has demonstrated on a grand scale.
A collective movement consists of millions of individuals, each of whom shows the symptoms of Wotanism and proves thereby that Wotan in reality never died but has retained his original vitality and autonomy.
Our consciousness only imagines that it has lost its gods; in reality they are still there and it only needs a certain general condition in order to bring them back in full force.
This condition is a situation in which a new orientation and adaptation are needed.
If this question is not clearly understood and no proper answer given, the archetype which expresses this situation steps in and brings back the reaction which has always characterized such times, in this case Wotan.
As only certain individuals are capable of listening and of accepting good advice, it is most unlikely that anybody would pay attention to the statement of a warning voice that Wotan is here again.
They would rather fall headlong into the trap.
As we have largely lost our gods and the actual condition of our religion does not offer an efficacious answer to the world situation in general and to the "religion" of Communism in particular, we are very much in the same predicament as the pre-National-Socialistic Germany of the twenties, i.e., we are apt to undergo the risk of a further but this time worldwide Wotanistic experiment.
This means mental epidemics and war.
One does not realize yet that when an archetype is unconsciously constellated and not consciously understood, one is possessed by it and forced to its fatal goal.
Wotan then represents and formulates our ultimate principle of behavior, but this obviously does not solve our problem.
The fact that an archaic god formulates and expresses the dominant of our behavior means that we ought to find a new religious attitude, a new realization of our dependence upon superior dominants.
I don't know how this could be possible without a renewed self-understanding of man, which unavoidably has to begin with the individual.
We have the means to compare man with other psychic animalia and to give him a new setting which throws an objective light upon his existence, namely as a being operated and manoeuvred by archetypal forces instead of his "free will," that is, his arbitrary egoism and his limited consciousness.
He should l earn that he is not the master in his own house and that he should carefully study the other side of his psychic world which seems to be the true ruler of his fate.
I know this is merely a "pious wish" the fulfillment of which demands centuries, but in each aeon there are at least a few individuals who understand what man's real task consists of, and keep its tradition for future generations and a time when insight has reached a deeper and more general level.
First the way of a few will be changed and in a few generations there will be more.
It is most unlikely that the general mind in this or even in the next generation will undergo a noticeable change, as at present man seems to be quite incapable of realizing that under a certain aspect he is a stranger to himself.
But whoever is capable of such insight, no matter how isolated he is, be aware of the law of synchronicity.
As the old Chinese saying goes: "The right man sitting in his house and thinking the right thought will be heard a 100 miles away."
Neither propaganda nor exhibitionist confessions are needed.
If the archetype, which is universal, i.e., identical with itself always and anywhere, is properly dealt with in one place only, it is influenced as a whole, i.e., simultaneously and everywhere.
Thus an old alchemist gave the following consolation to one of his disciples: "No matter how isolated you are and how lonely you feel, if you do your work truly and conscientiously, unknown friends will come and seek you."
It seems to me that nothing essential h a s ever been lost, because its matrix is ever-present within us and from this it can and will be reproduced if needed.
But only those can recover it who have learned the art of averting their eyes from the blinding light of current opinions, and close their ears to the noise of ephemeral slogans.
You rightly say with Multatuli, the Dutch philosopher: "Nothing is quite true"
and should add with him : "And even this is not quite true."
The intellect can make its profound statement that there is no absolute Truth.
But if somebody loses his money, his money is lost and this is as good as an absolute Truth, which means that he will not be consoled by intellectual profundity.
There is a thing like convincing Truth but we have lost sight of it, owing the loss mostly to our gambling intellect, to which we sacrifice our moral certainty and gain thereby nothing but an inferiority-complex, which-by the way-characterizes Western politics.
To be is to do and to make.
But as our existence does not depend solely upon our ego-will, so our doing and making depend largely upon the dominants of the unconscious.
I am not only willing out of my ego, but I am also made to be creative and active, and to be quiet is only good for someone who has been too-or perversely-active.
Otherwise it is an unnatural artifice which unnecessarily interferes with our nature.
We grow up, we blossom and we wilt, and death is ultimate quietude-or so it seems.
But much depends upon the spirit, i.e., the meaning or significance, in which we do and make or-in another word-live.
This spirit expresses itself or manifests itself in a Truth, which is indubitably and absolutely convincing to the whole of my being in spite of the fact that the intellect in its endless ramblings will continue forever with its "But, ifs," which however should not be suppressed but rather welcomed as occasions to improve the Truth.
You have chosen two good representatives of East and West.
Krishnamurti is all irrational, leaving solutions to quietude,
i.e., to themselves as a part of Mother Nature.
Toynbee on the other hand believes in making and molding opinions.
Neither believes in the blossoming and unfolding of the individual as the experimental, doubtful and bewildering work of the living God, to whom we have to lend our eyes and ears and our discriminating mind, to which end they were incubated for millions of years and brought to light about 6ooo years ago, viz . at the moment when the historical continuity of consciousness became visible through the invention of script.
We are sorely in need of a Truth or a self-understanding similar to that of Ancient Egypt, which I have found still living with the Taos Pueblos.
Their chief of ceremonies, old Ochwiah Biano (Mountain Lake) said to me : "We are the people who live on the roof of the world, we are the sons of the Sun, who is our father.
We help him daily to rise and to cross over the sky.
We do this not only for ourselves, but for the Americans also.
Therefore they should not interfere with our religion.
But if they continue to do so [by missionaries J and hinder us, then they will see that in ten years the Sun will rise no more."
He correctly assumes that their day, their light, their consciousness, and their meaning will die when destroyed by the narrow-mindedness of American rationalism, and the same will happen to the whole world when subjected to such treatment.
That is the reason why I tried to find the best truth and the clearest light I could attain to, and since I have reached my highest point I can't transcend any more, I am guarding my light and my treasure, convinced that nobody would gain and I myself would be badly, even hopelessly injured, if I should lose it.
It is most precious not only to me, but above all to the darkness of the creator, who needs man to illuminate His creation.
If God had foreseen his world, it would be a mere senseless machine and man's existence a useless freak.
My intellect can envisage the latter possibility, but the whole of my being says "No" to it.
Sincerely yours,
C.G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 592-597
"Individuality"
The way towards a solution of our contemporary problems I seem to propose is in reality the process I have been forced into as a modern individual confronted with the social, moral, intellectual, and religious insufficiencies of our time I recognize the fact that I can give only one answer, namely mine, which is certainly not valid universally, but may be sufficient for a restricted number of contemporary individuals inasmuch as my main tenet contains nothing more than: Follow that will and that way which experience confirms to be your own, i.e., the true expression of your individuality.
As nobody can become aware of his individuality unless he is closely and responsibly related to his fellow beings, he is not withdrawing to an egoistic desert when he tries to find himself. He can only discover himself when he is deeply and unconditionally related to some, and generally related to a great many, individuals with whom he has a chance to compare and from whom he is able to discriminate himself.
If somebody in supreme egoism should withdraw to the solitude of Mt. Everest, he would discover a good deal
about the amenities of his lofty abode but as good as nothing about himself, i.e., nothing he could not have known before.
Man in general is in such a situation in so far as he is an animal gifted with self-reflection but without the possibility of comparing himself to another species of animal equally equipped with consciousness.
He is a top animal exiled on a tiny speck of planet in the Milky Way.
That is the reason why he does not know himself; he is cosmically isolated.
He can only state with certainty that he is no monkey, no bird, no fish, and no tree.
But what he positively is, remains obscure. Mankind today is dreaming of interstellar communications.
Could we contact the population of another star, we might find a means to learn something essential about ourselves.
Incidentally we are just living in a time when homo homini lupus threatens to become
an awful reality, and when we are in dire need to know beyond ourselves.
.
The science fiction about travelling to the moon or to Venus and Mars and the lore about Flying Saucers are effects of our dimly felt but none the less intense need to reach a new physical as well as spiritual basis beyond our actual conscious world.
Philosophers and psychologists of the XIXth and XXth centuries have tried to provide
a terra nova in ourselves, that is, the unconscious.
This is indeed a discovery which could give us a new orientation in many respects .
Whereas our fictions about Martians and Venusians are based upon nothing but mere speculations, the unconscious is within the reach of human experience.
It is almost tangible and thus more or less familiar to us, but on the other hand a strange existence difficult to understand.
If we may assume that what I call archetypes is a verifiable hypothesis, then we are confronted with autonomous animalia gifted with a sort of consciousness and psychic life of their own, which we can observe, at least partially, not only in living men but also in the historic course of many centuries .
Whether we call them gods, demons, or illusions, they exist and function and are born anew with every generation.
They have an enormous influence on individual as well as collective life, and despite their familiarity they are curiously non-human.
This latter characteristic is the reason why they were called gods and demons in the past and why they are understood in our "scientific" age as the psychic manifestations of the instincts, inasmuch as they represent habitual and universally occurring attitudes and thought-forms.
They are basic forms, but not the manifest, personified, or otherwise concretized images.
They have a high degree of autonomy, which does not disappear when the manifest images change.
When f.i. the belief in the god Wotan vanishes and nobody thinks of him any more, the phenomenon, called Wotan originally, remains; nothing changes but its name, as National Socialism has demonstrated on a grand scale.
A collective movement consists of millions of individuals, each of whom shows the symptoms of Wotanism and proves thereby that Wotan in reality never died but has retained his original vitality and autonomy.
Our consciousness only imagines that it has lost its gods; in reality they are still there and it only needs a certain general condition in order to bring them back in full force.
This condition is a situation in which a new orientation and adaptation are needed.
If this question is not clearly understood and no proper answer given, the archetype which expresses this situation steps in and brings back the reaction which has always characterized such times, in this case Wotan.
As only certain individuals are capable of listening and of accepting good advice, it is most unlikely that anybody would pay attention to the statement of a warning voice that Wotan is here again.
They would rather fall headlong into the trap.
As we have largely lost our gods and the actual condition of our religion does not offer an efficacious answer to the world situation in general and to the "religion" of Communism in particular, we are very much in the same predicament as the pre-National-Socialistic Germany of the twenties, i.e., we are apt to undergo the risk of a further but this time worldwide Wotanistic experiment.
This means mental epidemics and war.
One does not realize yet that when an archetype is unconsciously constellated and not consciously understood, one is possessed by it and forced to its fatal goal.
Wotan then represents and formulates our ultimate principle of behavior, but this obviously does not solve our problem.
The fact that an archaic god formulates and expresses the dominant of our behavior means that we ought to find a new religious attitude, a new realization of our dependence upon superior dominants.
I don't know how this could be possible without a renewed self-understanding of man, which unavoidably has to begin with the individual.
We have the means to compare man with other psychic animalia and to give him a new setting which throws an objective light upon his existence, namely as a being operated and manoeuvred by archetypal forces instead of his "free will," that is, his arbitrary egoism and his limited consciousness.
He should l earn that he is not the master in his own house and that he should carefully study the other side of his psychic world which seems to be the true ruler of his fate.
I know this is merely a "pious wish" the fulfillment of which demands centuries, but in each aeon there are at least a few individuals who understand what man's real task consists of, and keep its tradition for future generations and a time when insight has reached a deeper and more general level.
First the way of a few will be changed and in a few generations there will be more.
It is most unlikely that the general mind in this or even in the next generation will undergo a noticeable change, as at present man seems to be quite incapable of realizing that under a certain aspect he is a stranger to himself.
But whoever is capable of such insight, no matter how isolated he is, be aware of the law of synchronicity.
As the old Chinese saying goes: "The right man sitting in his house and thinking the right thought will be heard a 100 miles away."
Neither propaganda nor exhibitionist confessions are needed.
If the archetype, which is universal, i.e., identical with itself always and anywhere, is properly dealt with in one place only, it is influenced as a whole, i.e., simultaneously and everywhere.
Thus an old alchemist gave the following consolation to one of his disciples: "No matter how isolated you are and how lonely you feel, if you do your work truly and conscientiously, unknown friends will come and seek you."
It seems to me that nothing essential h a s ever been lost, because its matrix is ever-present within us and from this it can and will be reproduced if needed.
But only those can recover it who have learned the art of averting their eyes from the blinding light of current opinions, and close their ears to the noise of ephemeral slogans.
You rightly say with Multatuli, the Dutch philosopher: "Nothing is quite true"
and should add with him : "And even this is not quite true."
The intellect can make its profound statement that there is no absolute Truth.
But if somebody loses his money, his money is lost and this is as good as an absolute Truth, which means that he will not be consoled by intellectual profundity.
There is a thing like convincing Truth but we have lost sight of it, owing the loss mostly to our gambling intellect, to which we sacrifice our moral certainty and gain thereby nothing but an inferiority-complex, which-by the way-characterizes Western politics.
To be is to do and to make.
But as our existence does not depend solely upon our ego-will, so our doing and making depend largely upon the dominants of the unconscious.
I am not only willing out of my ego, but I am also made to be creative and active, and to be quiet is only good for someone who has been too-or perversely-active.
Otherwise it is an unnatural artifice which unnecessarily interferes with our nature.
We grow up, we blossom and we wilt, and death is ultimate quietude-or so it seems.
But much depends upon the spirit, i.e., the meaning or significance, in which we do and make or-in another word-live.
This spirit expresses itself or manifests itself in a Truth, which is indubitably and absolutely convincing to the whole of my being in spite of the fact that the intellect in its endless ramblings will continue forever with its "But, ifs," which however should not be suppressed but rather welcomed as occasions to improve the Truth.
You have chosen two good representatives of East and West.
Krishnamurti is all irrational, leaving solutions to quietude,
i.e., to themselves as a part of Mother Nature.
Toynbee on the other hand believes in making and molding opinions.
Neither believes in the blossoming and unfolding of the individual as the experimental, doubtful and bewildering work of the living God, to whom we have to lend our eyes and ears and our discriminating mind, to which end they were incubated for millions of years and brought to light about 6ooo years ago, viz . at the moment when the historical continuity of consciousness became visible through the invention of script.
We are sorely in need of a Truth or a self-understanding similar to that of Ancient Egypt, which I have found still living with the Taos Pueblos.
Their chief of ceremonies, old Ochwiah Biano (Mountain Lake) said to me : "We are the people who live on the roof of the world, we are the sons of the Sun, who is our father.
We help him daily to rise and to cross over the sky.
We do this not only for ourselves, but for the Americans also.
Therefore they should not interfere with our religion.
But if they continue to do so [by missionaries J and hinder us, then they will see that in ten years the Sun will rise no more."
He correctly assumes that their day, their light, their consciousness, and their meaning will die when destroyed by the narrow-mindedness of American rationalism, and the same will happen to the whole world when subjected to such treatment.
That is the reason why I tried to find the best truth and the clearest light I could attain to, and since I have reached my highest point I can't transcend any more, I am guarding my light and my treasure, convinced that nobody would gain and I myself would be badly, even hopelessly injured, if I should lose it.
It is most precious not only to me, but above all to the darkness of the creator, who needs man to illuminate His creation.
If God had foreseen his world, it would be a mere senseless machine and man's existence a useless freak.
My intellect can envisage the latter possibility, but the whole of my being says "No" to it.
Sincerely yours,
C.G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 592-597
Professor Mansell Jones in his Modern French Poetry ([1951] pp. 30-31) takes up this theme with reference to two kinds of symbolism which he refers to as vertical and horizontal. Vertical symbolism is of the dualistic variety, setting the sign or the work of art as a link between two worlds, between Heaven and Hell. It is concerned with the world as Time process, as becoming, and with the means of escape from Time into eternity by means of art and beauty. Vertical symbolism asserts the individual will against the hoi polloi. It is aristocratic. Yeats is the perfect exemplar.
Horizontal symbolism, on the other hand, sets the work of art and the symbol a collective task of communication, rather than the vertical task of elevating the choice human spirit above the infernal depths of material existence. In idealist terms, the vertical school claims cognitive status for its symbols, because the conceptual meanings attached to art are in this view a means of raising the mind of man to union with the higher world from which we have been exiled. Whereas, on the other hand, the horizontal, or space school, appeals to intuition, emotion and collective participation in states of mind as a basis for communication and of transformation of the self. The vertical school seeks to elevate the self above mere existence. The horizontal symbolists seek to transform the self, and ultimately to merge or annihilate it. https://www.thefreelibrary.com/Eliot+and+the+Manichean+myth+as+poetry.-a0280004567
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